Drive/James Sallis

While there’s much I find admirable about James Sallis’s novel DRIVE, I’m afraid I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. DRIVE is a lean, stripped-down novel about a professional freelance getaway driver, written in terse prose that’s polished to a thing of beauty. There are good action scenes, and Sallis does a great job of establishing characterization with a few well-chosen words rather than pages of exposition. So with all that going for it, why didn’t I like the book very much? Sallis’s non-linear approach to storytelling just doesn’t work too well for me. The story constantly shifts back and forth in time, and while I didn't find that confusing – Sallis has firm enough control of his material that I always knew what was going on – I did find it annoying and I thought it diluted the impact of the novel, causing me to care less about the outcome than I should have. I’ve encountered this same problem with other writers – Elmore Leonard comes to mind – and I have to conclude that I’m just a little too stodgy and old-fashioned as a reader for this technique to work for me. Doesn’t mean that DRIVE isn’t a very good book. I think it is. I know some of you have already read it and liked it a great deal, and I’m sure most of the rest of you would, too, so this is one of those rare occasions when I’m recommending a book I didn’t care all that much for myself.