Leaving her home in Seattle in midsummer to drive "the long way round" to the Detroit auto show, Lesley Hazleton embarks on a five-month journey to visit the holy places for cars-- where they are raced, displayed, crashed, tested, and made-- as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles. Her quest takes her on a road trip that teaches her not only about cars and the peculiar passions of car lovers but also about herself. A committed environmentalist in thrall to the internal combustion engine, Hazleton explores her own worship of speed during assaults on the landspeed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats; negotiates the famed off-road Rubicon Trail across the Sierras; finds the exact spot where James Dean died in his Porsche Spyder; and attends a crash conference in Albuquerque, where her discovery that "when metal and flesh collide, metal always wins" sheds light on our erotic fascination with the automobile. She crushes cars in a Houston junkyard; works the nightshift at the Saturn plant in Tennessee; and in Detroit, turns away from the glitz and gleam of new metal to watch what happens when a car is driven into a million pounds of concrete. Along the way she corresponds with a class of eight-year-olds, befriends a priest who fixes his parishioners' cars, and encounters people and places where cars are created, worshiped, celebrated, and even feared. Throughout her journey, Hazleton's ability to make us see and smell and hear what is unique about each place she visits keeps us riveted, eager to move on with her to the next town on the map. Halfway through this extraordinary adventure, Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes a journey of grief and memory, a deeply personal odyssey that after thirteen thousand miles almost costs her her own life on an ice-bound highway. What begins as a romance takes her deep into the heartland of obsession, evolving into a meditation on life and death as she delves into the soul of a nation and its machine.
- ISBN10 0684860112
- ISBN13 9780684860114
- Publish Date 2 August 1999 (first published 1 November 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 September 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Simon & Schuster Ltd
- Imprint Scribner
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 320
- Language English