Freeway

by Deanne Barkley

Free-Way

231 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 1980

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. Is this what Bret Easton Ellis was talking about? The cover image had me expecting the novel version of Point Blank or Bullitt, but this actually felt more like one of Atom Egoyan's quiet, panoramic 90s movies- lonely people in a big city drawn together by chance or fate, in this case by the specter of a freeway sniper who drives a dark-blue Maverick, pulls up alongside his victims with the same move every night (left hand turning off the headlights, right hand reaching for the gun in the passenger seat), and then vanishes down the nearest off-ramp before anyone can catch him. I'm tempted to call this a snapshot of LA in the late 70s, but it's a strange one- going for neither granular realism on one hand, nor out-and-out surrealism on the other. It channels more the ambient hum of the nighttime hours: the people in ER waiting rooms, the TVs left on in quiet bedrooms, the Top 40 DJ on the radio, and a vision of the freeway as a lawless, dreamlike annex to the city proper, a place where two strangers might find romance as easily as sudden, shattering violence. Characters who work the night shift are almost always interesting; and the widowed night-nurse Sunny, who leaves her front door unlocked every night and starts an affair with a man who may or may not be the sniper, was quite a memorable one. Very cool novel, overall.

[Jordan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5; pulp Altman - Nashville reimagined as a west coast grindhouse take on Little Murders, with an LA haunted by a mystery shooter randomly drive by-ing people on the freeway refracted thru a handful of disparate citizens whose lives are impacted (and increasingly connected) by the ongoing rampage. Both of its time and strongly transitional, very much a reflection of the early 70s malaise era with alienation, helplessness, and ceaseless grinding fear the order of the day, while the portrayal of latchkey kids skateboarding aimlessly across the city in desperate search of guidance or meaning feels like a dress rehearsal for the likes of River's Edge and Penelope Spheeris, not to mention prefiguring pretty perfectly the dawning of the era when the idealism and hopeful potential of the prior decade was replaced by coping/self-medication/distraction, and constant casual atrocity (gun based or otherwise), was definitively revealed to be a feature instead of a bug in our society. Other highlights include the death of a pick-up artist/would-be stalker so skin-crawlingly misogynistic his murder comes as a ray of comparative sunshine and an adulterous, heroin-addicted musician doing the 'stuck in Ojai' shuffle revealed to be one of most grounded characters in the novel.

[Cody]

Deanne Barkley did a very good job with this one. she combined the books scene of an industrial city with modern language all inevitably meeting back to the same scene that was the soul of the book. that there was a highway sniper terrorizing the streets, killing many in his path on the busy road. the book started out focused around a couple and a lone man who inevitably met his end of the road with a bullet to the head. and like the couple, the city and people in it as a whole was just as confused as the other. leading the book through a path of modern and rather uncensored language and scenarios, adding to the crazy excitement and suspense that Deanne Barkley puts upon the reader.