FREIGHT

Two men plan a heist in this gritty tale of long-haul truckers.

Truck driver Billy Trask snaps a woman’s neck, giving it no more thought than flicking a cigarette into the northern Maine snow. The murder appears to have neither motive nor consequence nor place in the plot, but it certainly establishes character. His nephew Curtis, a new dispatcher, muses about how easy it would be to steal a loaded trailer. Indeed, Billy has a scheme to heist a truckload of pharmaceuticals—“Inventory in that load is gonna be at least ten million dollars” at retail, netting Billy and his pal Jimmy about a million. Coming home like he won the lottery might improve Billy’s home life, he thinks. Meanwhile, in his time off, the college-educated Curtis writes stories about “unintended consequences and guilt and resentment” and reads essays by Emerson. At work, his education makes no difference as he assigns routes to drivers, always needing to make sure no one exceeds his strict time limit on the road. More miles mean more money, more time away from home, and more risk of fatigue and accidents. Curtis has mixed feelings about his job. Early on, he refers to the “dysfunctional trucking industry” but later waxes on about “the poetry of the whole thing, the endless cycle of the industry that ran all the time, the wheels that never stopped turning in the freight game.” Though he can get fully drunk at nine in the morning, he is the worthiest of sympathy of all the main characters. Look at Theo, for example. His wife, Lauren, stays at home while he picks up a stranger named Sarah along the highway. She turns out to be “an evil, vexing little sex doll” he begins to think is perfectly capable of killing him, and maybe he should abandon her at a random rest stop in Quebec. Good luck finding anyone to root for.

Well-written but keep your antidepressants handy.