Three books: The Last Taxi Driver, The Last Thing He Told Me, True Grit

I have fallen off my book report wagon. So here's a mention, at least, of the last three books I've finished, over the last three or so weeks (nos. 14–16 in my annual accounting).

Lee Durkee's The Last Taxi Driver (2020)—which George Saunders, on the cover, calls "a wild, funny, poetic fever dream that will change the way you think about America." Well, I don't know about the last part, but the first: yes. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, often poetic, and toward the end bordering on hallucinogenic, as our brave taxi driver, Lou, ferries all sorts of misfits around Mississippi and beyond. We hear his own story of failed dreams along the way. Though maybe, at the end, his luck is turning? One can only hope. I really enjoyed this book. 

Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me (2021) is about a man who suddenly disappears and his wife and daughter's search for him, ranging from a houseboat in Sausalito to Austin, Texas. Turns out, he got involved in bad goings-on back in the before time—before the wife, that is, whom he really does love—and he hoped he'd managed to leave all that behind him. Tsk. I worried through the whole read that this would turn into another unreliable narrator novel, but thankfully, that didn't happen. It was good enough. It certainly kept me turning the pages. 

Charles Portis's True Grit  (1968)—great book! Narrated by a now older (maybe even elderly) Mattie Ross, it tells the story of her effort, in the 1870s or 80s, when she was just fourteen, to bring to justice the killer of her father, with the help of US Marshal Rooster Cogburn and a Texas ranger, LaBoeuf. We all know the story: it was told in a 1969 film version starring Kim Darby as Mattie, John Wayne as Rooster, and Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf, and more recently in 2010 in the Coen Brothers' version, with Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon. But the book! Its plain no-nonsense telling of the events creates a real character, strong, principled, unforgiving, and utterly determined. The penultimate scene is breathtaking. (And now that I've scanned the back covers of these books, I see that Durkee's is described as "equal parts Bukowski and Portis"—which I do believe is why I picked up True Grit in the first place: if Durkee can be compared to Portis, then Portis must be good... and oh look! he wrote True Grit!)