The Last Taxi Driver

by Lee Durkee Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

Overview

This darkly comedic novel centers around a day in the life of an exhausted middle-aged hackie who's 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 returns to town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift that 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Samuel F. Nicholson

…disarmingly honest and darkly comic…

George Saunders

"A wild, funny, poetic fever-dream that will change the way you think about America. Durkee is a true original—a wise and wildly talented writer who knows something profound about that special strain of American darkness that comes out of blended paucity, materialism, and addiction—but also, in the joy and honesty and wit of the prose, he offers a way out. I loved this book and felt jangled and inspired and changed by it."

Garden & Gun

"Raunchy and sweet and, at times, psychedelic."

The A.V. Club

"For devotees of the offbeat and grit lit writers like Larry Brown and Mary Miller. Follow the air freshener rocking back and forth, taking you under its spell, as Durkee takes you for a ride."

Chris Offutt

"The best book I've read in years."

The Washington Examiner

"One of the best novels in recent memory. . . . A wild and hilarious ride."

Shelf Awareness

"A gonzo ride full of dark humor, philosophical insights, and shrewd observations about the plight of luckless people in the United States."

Tom Franklin

"Terrific."

Razorcake

"The Last Taxi Driver is a road novel . . . rooted firmly in our America. The novel almost makes other fiction in that Southern tradition seem frivolous by comparison."

Full Stop

"The Last Taxi Driver is a Canterbury Tales for our time . . . Decentralized, atomized, and alternately tranquilized and jacked up on cheap beer and meth, this is the world of Beckett, Godard, Robbe-Grillet."

The Chicago Review of Books

"Much of what makes Lee Durkee’s novel so delightful and surprising is his ability to dig beneath the surface of this funny, well-told odyssey, which channels a Shakespearean tragedy. This twenty-year follow up to his debut novel, Rides of the Midway, was worth the wait."

Mary Miller

"A frenetic, voyeuristic delight."

WIRED

"Charming as hell."

Bookreporter

"In Lou, Durkee has created a fascinatingly complex character . . . Durkee tackles race and poverty, violence of many varieties, loss and longing, and the power of the imagination. Lou’s excruciating day will make readers cringe, and the recounting of his traumas is more than unsettling. This is a dark, feverish, and weird tale that remains compelling throughout."

Luckbox Magazine

"The working-class realism of Charles Bukowski with the countercultural flamboyance of Hunter S. Thompson. . . . Yet somehow, the author creates such a vivid likeness of life that readers can’t help but feel uplifted. There’s beauty in the beastliness. Don’t miss this one."

William Boyle

"A stone cold masterpiece. 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."

The New York Times Book Review

"Disarmingly honest and darkly comic. . . . Beguiling, energetic, razor-sharp prose."

John Freeman

"The funniest writer you’ve never heard of, but that may change. His 2001 debut, Rides of the Midway, is a 1970s coming-of-age masterpiece . . . Now, nearly twenty years later, at last we have Durkee’s second book, his own reboot, and wow is it worth the wait . . . a future Tom Waits vehicle if there ever was one."

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile

If you didn’t know better, you’d be forgiven for thinking this audiobook is a memoir, not a novel. Patrick Lawlor narrates Durkee’s dark, funny, and, at times, disturbing novel in a way that makes the listener believe that the narrator and author are one and the same. The story of a former college professor, now a cab driver in Mississippi, is riveting in its depiction of life among the downtrodden, the forgotten, and the desperate. Add in a criminal element, and you have a listen that seems all too real. Lawlor delivers a pitch-perfect narration—so much so that you may believe you’re in the back seat of a cab as you listen. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-12-09
Durkee's long-awaited second novel (Rides of the Midway, 2001) is a black-comic delight.

Lou Bishoff is beset from all sides. After a promising debut novel that he's long ago ceased to imagine he'll ever follow up, he spent almost two decades in frigid Vermont (failed marriage, child-rearing, attendant despair). Now he's returned to his native Mississippi, where, after running through a succession of jobs, he's found a niche as a kind of knight-errant cab driver—Charon to meth heads, rehab escapees, elderly ICU refugees, and frat-boy monsters looking to score—in a college town (Gentry, a dead ringer for Oxford). But even this poor haven, a spavined, reeking, gas-guzzling Lincoln with a balky suspension and a "Shakespeare-mint" air freshener, is under imminent threat; Uber is set to arrive in weeks, the cab company owner's fugitive son has returned to town, and both Lou's back and his romantic life are in perpetual spasm. All this provides the setup for a remarkable one-day picaresque as we follow Lou on a marathon shift through a blasted landscape that's part Denis Johnson-ish carnival of the wrecked, part Nietzschean Twilight of the Gods (or Twilight of the Taxicabs). Lou is damaged, bitter, self-righteous, with a hint of Sam Spade masochism that one fare recognizes—yet the book's relentless grimness never seems either relentless or grim. Instead there's a comic sweetness and energy underneath that reminds one of Charles Portis. Lou has every reason for cynicism, but a dogged hope and playfulness, remnants of his studies in Buddhism and the influence of comedian Bill Hicks, keep pressing through; even when the car breaks down—and his body and every last structure of the world around him—he has the refuge of his considerable wit.

A dark pleasure.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177234465
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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