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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Casual Car Pool by Katherine Bell

Written in the same way that Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield point of view writing, The Casual Car Pool is a great story about something very ordinary. Katherine Bell states: "I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters' consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. I ended up buying myself that freedom by limiting the story in another way -- I didn't let my characters off the bridge or even, for most of the story, out of the car."
Ian is a normal businessman who utilizes what is known as "the casual carpool" in order to get into the city and to work faster. However, after a parachuter gets tangled on the cables of the Bay Bridge traffic comes to a complete halt for the commuters. The voice jumps between Ian, who thinks of his family at home, to the 16 year old lesbian in the back seat who wants to but can't decide on who to receive her insemination from. The story really has very little action, but it is the consciousness of the story that brings it alive and makes it truly one of the best short stories of 2006.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

No offense, but from what I read, there were three characters in the car. There was Ian, the driver, Julia, the rebellious 16 year old in the back seat, and Hannah, the judgemental adult lesbian sitting in the front passenger seat.