Majestic Speedlube

Kathryn Scanlan’s Majestic Speedlube follows Happy and Early, couriers eking out a living driving unshippable objects—a taxidermied bear, a two-hundred pound crystal, a custom tombstone—across the country in their “club-cab bed-capped” rig. The resulting linguistic joy ride, powered by Scanlan’s signature live-wire style, is a hectic confluence of billboards, user reviews, overheard conversations, receipts, bumper stickers, bills of lading, diner orders and a very talkative radio—a discordant, clanking music of simulated gunfire, bleating microwaves, squealing dry vans and trains blasting their grievous mourning horns. Yet in the din of the novel are clearings and rest stops for bright bursts of pleasure—moments of stillness and profundity in nature, with animals, with children: a silent steel-haired couple dance a waltz, a woman saves a snapping turtle from getting crushed on the road, and light comes in “godly shafts through the trees.” Here the usual givens of the novel form are sidestepped in service to a narrative that pays precise, epiphanic and capacious attention to the vast and the infinitesimal in a feat of distilled radical empathy. Majestic Speedlube, as it barrels along—restless and relentless, lean and prickly—hums with power and mystery, with language that’s alive and kicking. It’s at once a comedy, a lament, an ecological elegy, an account book, a pastoral, a protest song—the Great American Novel thundering with consumption, where “the whole kit of life” can be seen through busted-out windows—and a new vision of how the “pure products of America / go crazy.”