The Last Taxi Driver

by Lee Durkee

The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a day in the life of an exhausted, middle-aged cabbie about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms. Lou - a lapsed novelist and UFO enthusiast who has returned to his home state of Mississippi after decades away - drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Lou s way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher resurfaces in town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift which will test Lou's sanity and perhaps cost him his life. Against this backdrop, Lou has to keep driving, and driving - even if that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car. Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver careens through the highways and backroads of North Mississippi as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee's novel is an homage to a dying American industry.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Contemporary, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction, Novels, Americana

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2020

About the author

Lee Durkee's novel THE LAST TAXI DRIVER (Tin House Books) was named a Best Book of the Year in three countries in 2021. He is also the author of the novel RIDES OF THE MIDWAY (WW Norton, 2001). His memoir STALKING SHAKESPEARE, which chronicles his hilarious and irreverent two decade obsession with finding lost portraits of William Shakespeare, will be released by Scribner Books in April 2023. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, The Oxford American, Zoetrope, Garden & Gun, Tin House, & Mississippi Noir. He lives in North Mississippi.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Voice driven. Interesting premise. Feels authentic. Not my cup of tea.

[Glenn Russell]

In his book on writing, Sol Stein eloquently states: "Writers of fiction are masters of evoking emotion, whereas writers of nonfiction are adept at conveying information. The best authors are able to do both: they wrap facts in compelling stories."

As The Last Taxi Driver makes abundantly clear: Lee Durkee is indisputably a master of the craft, a novelist capable of evoking an entire range of emotion and folding a skillet full of Southern-fried facts into his riveting storytelling.

After I finished reading The Last Taxi Driver, I immediately turned to the first page and read the novel a second time. I also listened to the crackerjack audio book narrated by Patrick Lawlor. Dang, I didn't want to leave the author's taxi (actually a Lincoln Town Car) and I didn't want to leave Mississippi. The story is that good.

The Last Taxi Driver published in 2020 and is Lee Durkee's second novel. His first novel, Rides of the Midway, hit the bookstores twenty years back when Lee was one of those promising young writers. What's a novelist to do when it takes him two decades to write his next novel? Answer: Drive a cab in his home state of Mississippi. Well, Lee certainly accumulated oodles of experience. And it shows - so much packed into 230 pages.

We're talking very autobiographical here. The tale's narrator is cabbie Lou Bishoff (you gotta love the short slide from Lee Durkee) based in the fictional college town of Gentry in North Mississippi. Gentry, what a hoot, what irony, as most folks are anything but gentry; nope, the gaggle of locals Lou drives around features, among others, an ex-con, a couple of methheads and a gun-toting slubberdegullion who happens to be the son of the owner of Lou's cab company.

And here's the key: Lou's narrative voice is so powerful and contains such energy and drive, it's as if we're inside Lou's skin as he sits behind the wheel. You do more than just read about Lou's heart-wrenching odyssey; you live it.

Lou's a former college English professor, favorite subject Shakespeare, who was fired some time back for headbutting a dude at a neighborhood bar. Bit by bit, Lou lets us in on the reasons why he lives with seething rage - he was the victim of various forms of abuse both as a kid and in high school, his son nearly lost his life after being hit by a car, as soon as he moved to Vermont at his wife's request, she divorced him, he's in a painful relationship with his current girlfriend, Miko the poet, and, last but hardly least, he's forced to endure an unending barrage of shit at work (see below).

And Lou is a deep, complex guy - like the author, he has a novel to his credit, he's a fan of Shakespeare, he has this thing about Big Foot and UFOs, he studies Buddhism (Lou claims to be the world's worst Buddhist), he wants to be kind and loving.

Let me emphasize one important point: The Last Taxi Driver is VERY FUNNY. I laughed out loud on nearly every page. You want entertaining? You want lively? This is your book.

Each of the novel's seventeen chapters carries a down dog Ole Miss title. I'll zero in on three -

STINK BOMBS
“Pardon my French, as my fares like to say, but you'd be freaking amazed by the smells that enter my taxicab. The numerous funks, farts, fumes, burps, breaths, bombs, and auras – odors that defy description – my least favorite among them being the putrid, seaweddy stench of frat-boy spit cups.” Lou's sensitive nose extends far beyond physical odors – he also sniffs out those guys saved from having to work a crap job since they are born into money. Sorry, Lou, it's a tough lesson, but your now dead father's words still ring true: Whoever told you life was fair, kid?

Lou's reflections on a fellow employee: “Zeke, the driver I'm picking up, is about forty years old and sometimes takes his daughter out with him at nights. His daughter is ten and must help considerably with tips. And his daughter is about the only reason you'd tip Zeke, who looks like a redheaded version of the Unabomber and wears bright superhero tee shirts that coalesce over his beer belly like poured oil.” We get to meet an entire string of women and men who ride in Lou's Lincoln. Among Lee Durkee's strengths - he gives us just the right telling details to make them memorable.

IDIOT SON
“At the end of today's conversation, I hang up exhausted and then crack open another Red Bull to stay awake. Red Bull should be sponsoring my cab the way they do race cars and those daredevils in wingsuits. As I sip my tasty energy drink, its label held toward the car camera, I'm still mulling over what Stella said, specifically the question she asked right before we hung up. Trying to sound casual, she'd asked if I'd heard from Tony recently.”

Stella is the owner of the cab company. Tony is her son. Tony deals drugs and doesn't shy away from violence. Tony was sent to a Kansas City prison. Here's Lou on Tony: “He's not an adult, even though he's mid-thirties and has three kids by some long-suffering woman he calls his baby mama. Tony has a cop-shaved head of black fur that tops off at six two. Like the overgrown chimp he greatly resembles, he is muscular with long arms and legs and almost no truck, as if he's composed only of limbs. His clothes are modeled on prison attire, and he often uses the phrase my nigga in referring to me, a man two decades older than him and equally white.” As might be expected, in typical Tony fashion, Tony muscles his way into Lou's cab during our Shakespeare-loving hero's forty-eight hour saga.

GRACELAND
“Hell no.” She crosses herself before picking up my phone with two fingers like it's infected with Ebola. “I might as well be from Mars the way everyone keeps staring at me. Chrome? Who the fuck uses Chrome, dude? Mississippi goddamn. Hey, you're not going to take me into the woods and do God knows what to me while some retard plays a banjo, are you? Seriously, what the fuck?”

These are the words of Samantha, a busty LA chick who came to a Mississippi rehab center since the center said they specialized in sex addiction. Samantha projects every single Deep South stereotype onto Lou: she calls him Billy Clyde; she's shocked when Lou plays Beethoven; she can't believe Lou has an air freshener in the shape of Shakespeare. The exchanges between Lou and Samantha count as among the funniest in the book.

Again, these are short snips from just three chapters. Much more awaits a reader, including Lou confronting an armadillo (thus the critter illustrated above), a UFO sighting and Lou making a radical transformation. How exactly? For Lee Durkee to tell.

The Last Taxi Driver - highly, highly recommended.


American author Lee Durkee

[Martin Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fiction writer myself, Lee Durkee makes me feel like a fraud, a laggard, and a plodder--his writing is that sharp and spectacular. He's an author's author, a master, and every word and riff in THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is spot-on. The tiniest details are honed and perfect, and the characters and plot strands meet in the final pages for a jaw-dropping ending. I've already "borrowed" his great line "the Cicero of quitting" and plan to use it every chance I get. I hope this novel finds the huge audience and big success it deserves. Well done, sir.

[William Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stone cold masterpiece. A Mississippi Buddhist cabbie who loves Bill Hicks, Shakespeare, and UFOs tries not to be destroyed by the act of helping people get where they need to be. Haven’t felt this way since reading JESUS’ SON and BRINGING OUT THE DEAD for the first time. Raw, revelatory, honest, full of kindness and anger and sadness and compassion.

[Anne]

“You shouldn’t have to try to like things,” Florence insisted. “It’s like people who force themselves to finish a book they’re not enjoying. Just close it! Go find another story!”

There is nothing funny or poetic about The Last Taxi Driver. It took less than fifty pages for me to realize it had peaked and wouldn’t likely get any better. The same goes for Lou, a chronic bellyacher, driving a taxi in southern Mississippi. The story is about a day in Lou’s life and all the crap he must endure to hold onto his dead-end job.

Lou is a walking – or in this case, a driving – mashup of clichés. He is a middle-aged Buddhist, UFO fan, aspiring novelist with a bad back who listens to Beethoven. Oh, yeah, he’s losing his job and his girlfriend.

The fares he transports are sketches of characters in downtrodden circumstances – the more pitiful the better – all to squeeze sympathy out of the reader. The text is filled with empty buzz words hoping to grab your attention. It is nothing but drivel.

Maybe I’m missing the point here. Perhaps this is satire, and I just don’t get it. Blame it on my lack of working knowledge about taxi’s (driving or riding).

If you like dark comedic, the laugh out loud kind, try The Ice Harvest, a noir mystery set in the 70s in a seedy small town in Kansas.

By the way, you won’t find that quote in this book. I just happen to read Who Is Maud Dixon? At the time I was reading this one. When I came across that line, I just couldn't help but feel that Florence would advocate closing this one and moving on.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stars are for the writing, not the content, which is at times difficult to read. I think this author is writing the truth of what he knows about the underbelly of society in this country, and while we may not want to associate with them, we all need to acknowledge that it exists. It is at times very very funny, and a taxi driver obsessed with Shakespeare and Beethoven is an interesting anomaly. Not a pleasure to read, but I'm glad I read it.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it four chapters in, one of which was a detailed description of the senseless killing of a possum. This is meant to be humor, and initially I thought it would be, but by the time I bailed, I was positive I would not find anything humorous about this foray into the dregs of society and human depravity.

It is sad, because the author can write obviously and there were moments in which I connected with both the driver and his fares. The old man he takes home from the hospital and leaves, reluctantly, alone in a trailer without help or food, was touching for me. But, I find it hard to wade through the excessive crude language or the abusive behavior to get to those moments.

Written for someone with a different sense of humor.

DNF at 25%.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this last night, a book of connected stories from the perspective of a taxi driver in northern Mississippi, who spends most of his time on hospital, prison, and drunk passengers. The author used to drive a taxi so I'm guessing he may have drawn from his experiences. I think someone should turn it into a TV show, perfect for these memorable characters.

This came out March 3 from Tin House and I had a copy through Edelweiss.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lou Bishoff is a former English professor driving a taxi for people at the end of the road in a north Mississippi university town. It sounded like an interesting enough premise, and I gave it the old college try, but it just never worked for me. With the exception of a flashback to a violent, traumatic incident from Lou's high school days, everything else is a blur of sad dramedies involving a cast of druggies, drunks, and dying who stagger in and out of his cab over the course of a day or so, never cohering into any kind of a plot nor developing any characters. Not my cup of Red Bull.

[Kathryn in FL · Rating 2 out of 5]

At more than 50% completion, I have decided not to abandon this book. It is most likely me. It wasn't my taste. There is humor interspersed that gave me occasion to laugh but for the most part it is to sad. The protagonist (who once was a writing professor) now a taxi driver, who has a bunch of regulars with sad lives and questionable decisions to fulfill.

The author is a professor, who drives a taxi cab. I am not sure how much of this is autobiographical. I see the talent and while some humor is a bit to derivative for my tastes (I do not mean that to be insulting), I just see a point in sticking it out to the end. Please take what I say with a grain of salt and make your own decision...

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has skill with description of characters and situations. However, these comedic vignettes of the down and outs of Mississippi weren’t really my taste. Many of them read like riffs by a stand up comic. Nevertheless, I would be willing to try a novel written by this author.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anybody who has done a gazillion jobs they didn't like because they work in the arts and are not so good at making a living will recognize themselves, or at least their struggle, in Lee Durkee's The Last Taxi Driver. Taking place mostly in Mississippi, this is really a sequence of stand-alone stories that are connected by a possibly psychotic taxi dispatcher and the narrator, angry, frustrated, demon-infested Lou . . . and Lou's hopeless attempts to be a good Buddhist . . . and all the hopeless passengers he carts to rehab and cheap motels . . . and come to think of it, this really is a novel, not separate stories. Don't listen to anything I say.

Except maybe don't listen to that either. I and many writers firmly believe in the motto "Recycle, recycle, recycle"—meaning, if a short piece we wrote hoping to make some money but never sold fits in a bigger work, slip it in and fill out the space; waste not any worthy literary labors. I suspected this was the case with a chapter called "Never Blink Your Headlights at a UFO and Other Driving Tips for Mississippians"* which I skimmed because I was so sure I knew what Durkee was doing, wasn't that interested in it, and I wanted to get to the next chapter which I hoped would bring me back into the story. It did. And it was so funny and Durkee so wonderfully built humor and frenzy from that point on that I instantly forgave any recycling.

This is a tour de force of man's-man writing. There are drunks and meth heads and skanks, hovel living and animal killing, and all levels of human degradation. I enjoyed the book (but not the animal killing). It's really well written and because many of the chapters do stand alone, I read it slowly, never having to backtrack after a day of missed reading to refresh my memory.

This is fine fiction.

Personal Plug
I just published what's perhaps a woman's-woman nonfiction piece about doing zombie jobs to support my art. You can read it here: Learning the Law.

_____________
*By the time I got to the symphonic fever dream of a last chapter, I decided the UFO chapter, even if it was a recycle, was necessary and well placed. So really don't listen to me on this book. If you're at all intrigued, read it and see what you think.

[John Dishwasher John Dishwasher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very funny! The protagonist here struggles to maintain his mental stability amid his ramshackle life, his illogical job in his deranged town, and our oppressive world. Pestered by his conscience, longing for indifference, and grappling with the unfairness of everything, he is a ‘failed’ intellectual who pays rent by driving a taxi around a small Mississippi burg. Only air fresheners, potential UFO contact, and the Buddha provide solace -- Those things plus his wry, quippish humor. You ride with this cabbie through a long day and into a stunning crescendo. The book reminded me of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Its tone and point of view are comparable to Kesey’s work, along with its quasi-rational protagonist jousting a mad, neverending drum of unreason and crazies and frustrations sandwiched between hospital trips and laundry runs and vomiting drunkards. Ha! Durkee draws his characters sympathetically (even when his protagonist hates them). And his prose is surgically precise and just a smorgasbord of flavorful fun. All of this adds up to an involving feast of laughs.

How much of ourselves do we give to others? And how much do we keep for ourselves? All of us with a sympathetic soul have struggled with this question, and have felt guilt occasionally for reserving that inner space for our own needs. Durkee has built a comedic novel around this problem and it kept me guffawing from page one to the back flap. Just watch this dude give the world the bird!

The book could also be read as a kind of comic jeremiad as told by a beleaguered working man.

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have two grand to my name plus a shabby condo in Vermont nobody wants to buy. I’m mid-fifties and worried sick about the future. Retirement? As far as I can tell this Town Car is my retirement.”

“There’s no way I’m surviving today, I realize. This is it. The day the five million Shakespeares of bad karma finally contrive to kill me. I don’t even care, man.”

*****

THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is a perfect overlapping Venn diagram of my two favorite literary genres: the Sad-Sad Middle-Aged Male existential wallow and the Unwilling Tourist In My Own Town punch-drunk picaresque.

Lou Bishoff is the archetype of the former; he’s a former college professor and forgotten novelist of long-forgotten promise who now drives a taxi cab for a skinflint company at a time when ride-sharing competitors are casting a long shadow over his Mississippi town, which bears a strong resemblance to the literary outpost of Oxford. He’s a loser who won’t admit as much only because doing so, you suspect, would commit the literary sin in Lou’s eyes of being too on-the-nose. He doesn’t dwell on his fifteen minutes for even fifteen minutes, because, as he notes: “The novel I had published some twenty years earlier is remembered locally, if at all, for a chapter in which the main character, a seventeen-year-old kid, fu**s a watermelon.”

Lou’s job is his picaresque. Like the dog that returns to lick up his own vomit because he can’t find a better meal, or is too lazy to look for one, Lee returns to his broken-down Town Car everyday for a boss who cheerfully rips him off at every turn out of what seems like weapons-grade complacency. Every day, he’s dispatched to deal with those on the margins of local society: drunks and druggies; criminals and castoffs; suicide kings and meth-motel queens; the mentally ill and the terminally ill.

Every fare brings with it the possibility of not collecting his fare. Nobody means to rip him off — there’s nobody of just one note in THE LAST TAXI DRIVER; Lee Durkee is too talented and too sharp an observer of fallen humanity for that — but everybody among the nobodies has a story that somehow comes between the cabbie and the cash he needs to keep dragging his careless carcass from one shift to the next. Most involve unscheduled stops at liquor stores and the empty houses of ex-spouses who supposedly owe them money.

That’s the story, really; you get the sense early on that the journey of THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is its destination, because all others seem too silly or schematic. He’s not going to get another college job; he’s not going to get another publishing deal (even though Durkee, who drove a cab during his twenty years between novels, did). He’s probably not lucky enough to die, either.

But I suspect you won’t care, because, oh what a grimly hilarious journey THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is in every passage and on every page. Just consider the roll call of whack jobs who release strange smells in the back seat of Lou’s bald-tired chariot, all of whom he despises and feels grudging fellowship with in practically the same fetid breath, in the course of a single Adderall-addled day. A small sampling:

• A former frat boy who Lou, years ago, sucker-punched in a bar.
• The sweet-sad son of the cab company’s owner, who cheerfully hijacks Lou in pursuit — or retreat — from the various people who want to arrest him or kill him.
• A sexy sex addict who may or may not seduce Lou, and he can’t decide if that’s the fulfillment or his dreams or the dragging-out of his nightmare.
• A rich senator’s alcoholic son and his crazy girlfriend, who atones for back-seat throw-ups with hundred-dollar bills.
• A meth-head mother-and-daughter duo who constantly prod Lou to make stop after stop for which he almost certainly won’t get paid. But may almost certainly get hurt.
• The town’s one black racist Republican.


As Lou reflects: “I tend to regard my first fare of the day as a tell, a hint as to what cards the stars might be holding. And right now I suspect it’s a full house of craven meth heads, spit-cupped bigots, shape-shifted aliens, suicide ex-cons, and one-eyed vomiting perverts.” And later: “They are always with me, all my meth heads, plus the guy sniffing his TV dinner, the long-faced farmer covered in grasshoppers, the hundred-year-old man in his hospital gown, the Goth girl, the howling baby, they are all crowded into the back seat of my Town Car like some demented team photo I glimpse, only for a moment, every time I check the rearview.”

What makes all of this so unassailably awesome, beyond its dark comic promise, is that Durkee not only knows these people but he knows how to write about these people. THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is one of those books that embodies one of my personal maxims of literature: the more quotable a book is, the better the book is. And over two readings, I highlighted more than 120 passages that made me laugh to the point of pancreatic rupture. Some of my favorites:

“At what moment do you stop being a taxi driver and start being a getaway driver?”

“Maybe for women it’s obvious early on that life isn’t fair, but men cling to the idea of fairness. We murder and go to prison and hang ourselves over it. Little boys especially worship fairness.”

“We are the poor man’s ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man’s priest, our cab the confessional in which people litmus-test their wildest fears and prejudices.”

“I felt some jealousy over his capacity to suffer love.”

“Customers are always asking me how cabbies get paid. With a nervous glance to the camera recording my life, I tell them taxis work just like sharecropping used to work.”

“Your main job as a driver in Mississippi is to anticipate stupidity: the door flung open into traffic, the Doberman leaping off the truck bed into your convertible.”

“Never use the turn signals on your monster truck because if you do all the people behind you in traffic will instantly assume you are impotent.”

“Weirdly, having a dick doesn’t make you an awesome driver. I thought I was a fantastic driver until I started driving a cab full time and almost killed dozens of innocent people. The first step to becoming a good driver is to admit you are a bad driver.”

“Don’t take selfies at red lights. It makes you look like a superfreak and is so dispiriting for others to behold it shatters their view of God and humanity and makes them desire an alien invasion.”

“When driving on a college campus assume everybody to be sleepwalking from Ambien overdoses.”

“My theory is that every human being has a human being cowering inside them.” Yes, I decide, she’s right. That’s exactly what Shakespeare did. He created the most fascinating people on earth and then made them grovel for their deaths.”

“You’re not a Mississippian, I guess, unless you’ve spent the long nights of childhood terrified that Satanists are climbing the sides of your house like iguanas toward your bedroom window.”

“William Faulkner is standing on the side of the highway holding a watermelon. As we pass him, our eyes meet, and he gives me the finger.”

“In a town this size you know everyone, or it feels that way, and you also know the rumors and trysts and disgraces attached to each person. You know their most whispered-about moments. You know about her ménage à trois or the time he got caught spying through that bedroom window or the dog she kicked in the eye with her stiletto or the time he called a jazz musician that name and tried to steal his saxophone or how she got a DUI with her kids in the car or what he said about you behind your back. Everybody elicits a response, an emotion, be it lust, hate, fear, envy, admiration, even love. Staring out that buggy windshield, I sit there painting everybody with my misconceptions about them. None of it’s true, not really. Or even if that rumor is true, you still don’t know but a fraction of the story. You weren’t there. You don’t know that chick. You don’t know that dude. Not really. Hell, you barely know yourself.”


If you like these lines and think you might like to find about a hundred more just as good and wise and hilarious and awful and awesome, then THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is your jam. It’s a jam for people who want to hurl your face into a doorjamb for saying “This is my jam.”

It is for Sad-Sack Middle-Aged American White Males, who, God love their Jason Isbell-poisoned hearts, have a dark thread of sweet sad sentimental soul running through the malignant tumor of their malignant maleness, malignent whiteness, malignant American-ness and malignant loser-ness. I’d never want to spend a minute of my life in person in the company of Lou Bishoff. But I like to read about them, because I’m sort of one of them, and I’m the sort of person who would never want to spend a minute of my life in the company of me. And I know that Lou Bishoff, and Lee Durkee, get that. And don’t we all want to be gotten as much in the books we read as the life we lead? (Or not lead?)

OK, well, I do, anyway. I still have something to learn from then, and possibly even from me through them.

[Mirella Hetekivi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I almost choked laughing so many times reading this I stopped counting after 10. Don't read and eat.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lou Bishoff. Sweet Lou. Lucky Gun Lou. Lou is a decent man who goes that extra step for his fares, even when they don't appreciate or deserve it. He lives in upper Mississippi up near Tennessee, close enough to be sent on cabruns to the Memphis International Airport or to pick up patients being released from the "organ swap hospital." As we spend this taxing taxiing day with him, we wonder how DOES he do it, with his back spasms, his down and out relationship with the owner of the company that owns the beat up Lincoln cab he drives, and the encroaching presence of Uber eating up the business. The culture of taxi drivers is a diverse, colorful one, an industry that is dying out in every corner these days, and having seen it from the inside, I find it a fascinating subject.

[Tom Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been highly recommended by well-known southern authors such as Ron Rash and Chris Offutt and I can see why. His prose is brilliant, his humor is darkly incisive and his portrayal of a down-and-out hack driver is spot on. That said, listening to the audio version of this book left me with the sensation of fingernails on a chalk board. Few of the characters were appealing and many were downright repulsive. Many of the characters are either crooks, crack addicts, rapists or drunks. While listening to it in my car, my daughter's fiancé asked of this was going to end with the protagonist blowing his brains out. As feel-good stories go, this is not going to win any prizes.

Bottom line: A piece of art may be brilliant and powerful, but if its central theme is ugly, there is not going to be a place for it in my living room.

My thanks to the late Mike Sullivan, aka Lawyer, and all the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.

[Aisling · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impossible to put down glimpse into a life few of us know; hardscrabble Mississippi and the rejects of society who still use taxis--hospital discharges with no family, meth addicts, the lonely elderly, alcoholics who at least have the good sense not to drive themselves. Which may not seem like a compelling read but the lens--a Shakespeare loving, ufo believing, fired teacher with a love hate relationship with his state and a thoughtful if twitchy way of viewing the world and the flotsam and jetsam that enters his cab does make for incredibly entertaining reading. Really great.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was totally in awe of this. Perfectly balanced, this one. Wildly funny and also a real terror of the soul kinda thing. Lee Durkee is a monster of a writer, this shit slays. Read it. Talk to me about it.

[Nina (ninjasbooks) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Funny and original

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An wild romp through the dregs of a Mississippi nowheresville in the company of a hyper-intelligent misfit cabbie. The plot is meandering and minimal, so most of the book consists of the narrator describing his appalling job, the miserable people he encounters, and horrific Southern dysfunction. It all rang true to my ear, though in truth I don't know much about that milieu. Though it lacked suspense and character development, the book is still engaging because of its invincibly strong narrative voice.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not living where taxis are relevant, I know nothing about taxis or cab drivers. I was 40 before I rode in a cab. But for a book sort of about a ‘day in the life’ of a taxi driver, I had no idea what to expect, but I loved what I got!!

I didn’t know that Mississippi even had a town car taxi service!!! But Lou Bishoff, or Lucky Gun Lou (as some might know him as) is the guy that drives the taxi. I found him to be a rather respectable guy that was helpful to most of his patrons. He did seem to find compassion for most of them… but geez did he have a strange group. He just seemed a person who had so much more to give that I would have never expected him to be driving a taxi cab… not that I know many cab drivers… The problem is that HE never expected it either... and then there he was... driving a cab.

Lou is an educated man, having been an adjunct professor of English, he dreamed of teaching Shakespeare. He tried to write a book, he loves UFOs, he loves 'bigfoot', he is was a manager, but he ended up driving 70 hours a week in a cab he doesn’t own and Uber is on its way. He hates his dispatcher who doesn’t understand … shift over and he has Lou driving with back spasms on into the night with lots of crazy people…

If you think that the riders in a taxi would be of all status and all levels of problems, you won't be disappointed. I wasn’t clearly aware that cab drivers, priest, and bartenders tend to fill the same societal needs, someone to confess to! Everyone seems to want to burden poor Lou with their personal problems and explain and describe everything from relationships to surgery to him!
But there is no reciprocation there, they truly don’t seem interested in his personal life issues, his crappy relationship with the owner of the cab company, his home issues, or his beat-up Lincoln… dropping parts like bread crumbs in hopes of his return trip home. With Uber and Lyft, the cab driver is going to be an extinct occupation, much like the phone operator, soon to be a car salesman or real estate agent whose jobs have changed since the Internet. The whole book is a hoot!

This reminds me of why I have a car! But, it is so worth crawling into the backseat and taking the ride!

4 Stars

Happy Reading!

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This "not my normal read" book was a recommendation I found by listening to a Podcast with Ron Rash. He recommended this book and author at the very end. Why not give it a try? I found it to be quite funny, if you are not an easily offended reader. To be frank, most of the people you meet in the book are pathetic. My favorite taxi rider was Anna. I felt sorry that she had to endure the back seat of that taxi no matter how obliging the driver was. I originally started at a fast reading pace and found I was thinking the chapters were more of the same and I was losing interest. I slowed it down to 2-3 chapters a day, almost approaching it like a short story collection, and found it more funny and readable.

[Lovely Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sempre piacevolissimo anche a una seconda rilettura, un autore pulp scorrevole e divertente che davvero meriterebbe più pubblico

[Terry · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really hate giving up on a book. I tried to listen to this but finally got disgusted and gave up. This book was just not for me.

One thought, though: Chapter 12 was Durkee’s own “Rules of the Road” for Taxi Drivers. It was mildly amusing. Just not amusing enough for me to suffer through the rest of the book.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't tell yet if this is my all-time favorite book or just way the hell up there. I read it twice in the last two weeks, and I never do that.
It's a brilliant fever dream of one day in the life of a troubled but ultimately good-hearted Shakespeare loving, conspiracy theorist cabbie, that expertly elevates the insanity at a magician's pace.
I can't stop thinking about it. Its tragic, hilarious, bizarre, and a little bit sexy(?).

I wish I could read it again for the first time.

What a fucking ride.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody lives on the knife-edge of fate like a taxi driver. That next dispatch, the next fare, the next detour. A taxi driver never knows their next destination. Or destiny.

And no taxi driver is in a better spot to ponder the fairness of life than Lou Bishoff, who drives in the fictional town of Gentry, Mississippi.

Lou’s rig is a ’95 ebony Town Car. It’s got one wheel in the junkyard. He calls it the Black Widow. He drives for a company called All Saints owned by a woman named Stella. His horn doesn’t work. He’s complained to Stella about it, but she informed him that good drivers don’t need one. “And in some ways she’s right,” thinks Lou. “A horn, like an active sex drive, can get you shot or blackjacked or cold-cocked or rear-ended.”

Lou is an expert in air fresheners. He keeps handy “a fat bottle of Ozium and a thin bottle of Aloha Febreze.” He’s into UFO’s. His girlfriend is a depressed ex-poet named Miko who is “entitled to a certain amount of ennui.” Lou is a novelist, but he’s gone “cold on the page.” A three-legged doe hangs around his backyard ravine. Lou tries to observe the deer “without attraction or aversion, like the Buddha advised, to somehow absorb her dignity without fixating on the ugliness of her stump or the direness of her fate.”

Lou has started reading Miko’s books about Buddhism “in an attempt to stop myself from flipping everybody off. So far it’s not helping. If anything, I’m getting worse.”

Lou works the day shift. “Stella likes to say that day shift cabbies are the fabric that holds the town together, that we’re as important as any utility, and sometimes I think I think she's right. While the night crew hauls around scrums of Adderall-vomiting co-eds and makes twice the Jack we do, the day shift takes citizens to work, mostly black people in the service industry. We cart the halt and lame to Kroger and lug their groceries up flights of stairs for dollar tips. We spring upstanding citizens from bail bondsman offices and squirrel them across town to the impoundment lot behind the Toyota dealership. We deliver rich people cigarettes and serve as care managers for the elderly—I've done everything from helping old people peeto taking out their garbage to chasing after their escaped pets. We are the poor man's ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man priest, our cab the confessional in which the people litmus-test their wildest fears and prejudices.”

Occasionally, Lou picks up fares at the Rebel Motel, “famous for murders and suicides but also for hosting art hops in which local painters appropriate the cell-like rooms to display their still lives to hipsters.” (The name “Rebel” is pronounced like a verb to create a rhyme with “Motel.”)

Stella’s drivers, Lou tells us, “work at least sixty-hour weeks and don’t have bank accounts or health insurance, they’ve never taken a vacation, and many of them don’t have but three or four teeth in their skulls.”

The Last Taxi Driver is a stream of attitude. And consciousness. It’s visceral, vivid, and propulsive. It’s a lesson in perceptive.

What Lou wants is a big telescope to peer deep into space from the darkest spot on the planet. What he’s good at is seeing individual citizens of the earth—all the warts, the weirdness, the struggles.

Lou has a core desire to do what’s right. But how likely are you to lend a hand when you have developed “a type of Tourette’s, unique to hackies.” It’s called a “yellow mind.” It’s a malady in which cabbies “drive around autocorrecting the world with a cuss-filled stream of consciousness. Quick-tempered, thin-skinned, a loogie of obscene complaints resting viciously on our tongues, we didn’t start off this way. No, it’s the job that yellows the mind.”

Lou’s a grouch. A curmudgeon. A well-schooled, writerly grumbler with wicked takes on the world. After a somewhat episodic first two-thirds of the novel, the story gels around a long trip to Memphis and back to bring back a liver transplant You might think Durkee is only good at an extended—albeit morally complicated—character sketch. And then he ramps up the suspense and tension toward a riveting finish where all those choices about getting involved in the lives of his passengers comes into sharp relief. As crude and raw as Lou’s mind whirls, he knows very well the choice between fear and love.

We watch, or try to watch, “without attraction or aversion” but, mostly, we howl (in a good way).

Ostensibly, Lou is the “last taxi driver” because Uber is on the way to Gentry and certainly the cab companies will be put out of business. Maybe. All we know is that Lou Bishoff will live forever.

FINAL NOTE: The similarities between The Last Taxi Driver and all nine books in The Asphalt Warrior Series by the late Gary Reilly are manifold. (Reilly died in 2011.) More than anything, the wisecracking, self-effacing, sardonic style. Reilly generally stays in the PG or PG-13 range; Durkee’s writing is more explicit. But Brendan Murphy (a.k.a Murph), the hero of Reilly’s series, is a struggling novelist much like Durkee’s Lou Bishoff. And both struggle with the classic issue of how much to get involved in the lives of their passengers. Lou, in fact, wonders if he might be aiding and abetting various crimes in progress. Murph would recognize that choice. Both Murph and Lou are smart, insightful, witty, and philosophical. The bottom line is I knew Gary Reilly well enough to know for a fact he would have loved The Last Taxi Driver. And if you enjoyed The Last Taxi Driver, I recommend all nine books by Gary Reilly: The Asphalt Warrior, Ticket to Hollywood, The Heart of Darkness Club, Home for the Holidays, Doctor Lovebeads, Dark Night of the Soul, Pick Up At Union Station, Devil’s Night, and Varmint Rumble.

[Tzipora · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That’s the beauty of the job. No matter how weird it gets, or how terribly it smells, they will be gone soon.”

Lou is a taxi Driver in Mississippi. He’s a bad Buddhist who, through endless hours on the job, finds his mind slipping to anger and frustration or as he says early on in the book “Unless I tell you otherwise I’m always flipping somebody off.” He works because he has to, doing this job after a slew of firings. But he’s a good taxi driver, knows the fastest routes anywhere, and has the whole area memorized.

He’s a relatable curmudgeon. Educated but blunt, someone who obviously cares a lot as much as he may rant. You’ll feel like you’re riding along beside him as he picks up a colorful collection of fares, from down on their luck regulars who rely on his cab to get to work, to meth heads, frat boys, hospital, prison, and rehab pickups. Everyone has a story and often times Lou’s cab becomes a confessional, his passengers sharing their story, their delusions, or just looking for a bit of companionship. These stories and passengers stick with Lou too, almost haunting him, so if he glances briefly in his rearview mirror he still sees his most memorable ones, always there riding with him.

Between snarky little jabs like “My whole life I’ve never seen anyone radiate idiocy so brilliantly” or “Never fuck with anybody in a Dodge Charger. They are all Mississippi satanist, which is the great white shark of satanist” and more poignant lines like “Maybe for women it’s obvious early on that life isn’t fair, but men cling to the idea of fairness. We murder and go to prison and hang ourselves over it. Little boys especially worship fairness.” my copy is full of bookmarks and tags marking favorite passages. There are characters, too, including Lou himself, that I know I’ll never forget. Or there’s Cancer Max who made it through rehab and a ghastly genital wart experience only to be told he had pancreatic cancer, and Anna, the book loving little old lady Lou takes around regularly to medical appointments, church, and the liquor store and loves talking to or trying to shock by loaning her dirty books. Durkee writes all of them so vividly at times I forgot this was fiction and it’s worth noting that he’s a former cab driver too. I’m so curious how much of the book is autobiographical. Either way, you’re in for a treat with this one, a single fever dream of a day in the cab with Lou.

This book was a ride! It’s so funny but also poignant, sad, and sometimes bizarre. It reads almost like a series of vignettes, with radically different and unforgettable passengers, with meditations and thoughts from Lou interspersed between. It’s quirky in the most genuine, fun way. Lou feels like someone you know or maybe a part of your own self, those jagged edges you try to keep tucked away. We get so inside his head and life and also learn so much about him through the way he views, treats, and discusses his passengers. His job is far from ideal and Stella, the taxi company owner and dispatcher with a drug addicted son on the lam, may short him on pay checks and occasionally (ok, regularly) screw him over. Yet Lou makes the best of things and does what he has to do. You may not want his job, but you’ll want to keep reading and be so glad you went along for the drive.

This was one of my favorite reads in a long time and unlike anything else. If you’re looking for something different, surprising and fun, but also filled with a kind of crass wisdom, this is the book for you! I loved Lee Durkee’s style- a bit stream of consciousness, blunt, and reading almost like a memoir. I would eagerly read his past and future books. It’s a quick read but one I didn’t want to end. With so many new release books out this week, make sure you don’t miss this one!

[Lauren Nossett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lou Bishoff loves Beethoven, reads Bhuddist philosophy, and drives a cab around a Mississippi town where everyone knows everyone's business. Throw in a car witch, albino possum, lots of airfreshener, and the ghosts of his former passengers, and you find a microcosm of America in the back of Lou's cab--frat boys frequenting drug dens, elderly passengers needing help into grasshopper infested trailers, riders struggling with meth addiction, or regulars spending half their pay on their way to and from minimum wage jobs.
There's a goth girl with a howling baby, a ninety-year-old grandmother who should be driven around by her children, but instead is one of Lou's favorite customers who talks about dirty novels and tips extra for stops at the liquor store. His fares are people with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, looking for love or drugs or the hospital. Lou's part priest, part caretaker, and part accomplice in a variety of nefarious activities, trying to do the right thing, or at the very least trying not to give everyone the middle finger.
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Dark, funny, and a little sad, The Last Taxi Driver will have you cringing one minute and laughing out loud the next.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my. I did wonder about the recommendation from George Saunders. It sure does promise a lot to the reader before the book itself even begins. Turns out it was 100% correct. This book is a masterpiece of fiction. I was going to say something cheesy like "journalistic fiction" but whatever you get the point. Read this. It's amazing.

I cannot stop thinking about Lou's story. So many tiny little straight out of left field nuggets of information are thrown at the reader much like the bugs pelting Lou's janky windshield of the town car. Long after reading I am still sitting here wondering what happens after, both to Lou and the car if I am honest with you. Did someone ever fix the shocks on the town car? This book will haunt me to the end of my time and possibly after.

The story here contains a weird venn diagram of character types, all converging in the middle to drive Lou nuts in one way or another. But can he be pushed over the edge if in fact he's already fallen?

I want to read this again and again and I probably will.