Red Light Run
Linked Stories
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant feat of storytelling, Red Light Run is the radiant and stunning debut from Best New American Voices writer Baird Harper.
When two cars collide at an intersection in a leafy Chicago suburb, Hartley Nolan is not the person police expect to find behind the wheel. After all, he barely drinks; everyone knows it’s his wife who’s the alcoholic. But the bigger question on people’s minds is what brought Sonia Senn, dead at the scene, back to her hometown in such a hurry that night?
In eleven tightly linked stories, Red Light Run pulls us into the inner lives of Hartley, Sonia, and a host of other characters to untangle the mounting forces that carry them to their fates. Among the ensemble in this prismatic collection are a real estate agent who seeks gossip on the market rather than houses, a trailer park developer whose entire livelihood is laid to waste by a single cigarette, a divorced mother battling her daughter-in-law for hegemony over her kitchen, a widower hell-bent on destroying the invasive species of beetle that’s wiping out his oak trees, and a down-and-out handyman with a desperate plan for revenge. And then there’s Sonia Senn, with a dark secret of her own, and Hartley Nolan, who has risen above his roots to become a commodities trader in Chicago only to end up sentenced to eight years at Grassland State Prison. With infectiously grim humor and wry insight, these characters contemplate their realities in relation to one tragic moment, propelling us toward a startling revelation about the long and sometimes crooked arc of justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The linked stories in this debut collection revolve around a drunk driving accident that ends the life of well-loved Sonia Senn and ironically sends Hartley Nolan whose wife, Glennis, has a problem with alcohol and who, as explained in "The Intervention So Far," had been attempting that very night to confront her about it to prison. Narrated by Sonia and Hartley, along with their parents, siblings, friends, and lovers, these stories interrogate not only the circumstances of the central tragedy but the wide-reaching implications it has on the lives of the network of characters affected by it. In "Time and Trouble," Hartley's mother, Kate, imagines how she will usher her son back into society on the eve of his release from prison and is forced to confront her anger toward his newly pregnant wife. In "Patient History," Glennis reveals her own troubled past and the ways in which she was led down the path toward addiction. The Chicagoland town of Wicklow, where much of the narrative takes place, is under siege by a mysterious species of beetle that is slowly devouring all of the community's oak trees from the inside out, and the damage wrought by the beetles becomes not only the obsession of Sonia's late husband, Victor, as he tries to protect the trees growing in the cemetery where Sonia is buried (in "We've Lost Our Place"), but also a memorable metaphor for the way grief works on us all. With its impressive range of narrative voices and fully imagined lives of yearning, sometimes desperate characters, this collection marks the arrival of a promising new voice in literary fiction.
