Highway Blue
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“You’ve never read a road trip novel like Ailsa McFarlane’s Highway Blue.”—Entertainment Weekly
A hypnotic debut of broken love on the run, from a blazingly original young writer
“In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky. And I drove . . .”
In the lonely town of San Padua, Anne Marie can never get the sound of the ocean out of her head. And it’s here—dog-walking by day, working bars by night—where she tries to forget about her ex-husband, Cal: both their brief marriage and their long estrangement.
When Cal shows up on Anne Marie’s doorstep one day, clearly in trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in a violent accident and the young couple are forced to hit the open road together in escape.
Crammed in a beat-up car with their broken past, so begins a journey across a vast, mythical American landscape, through the dark seams of the country, toward a city that may or may not represent salvation.
Highway Blue is a story of being lost and found—and of love, in all its forms. Written in spare, shimmering prose, it introduces the arrival of an electrifyingly singular new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McFarlane's dreamy if tepid debut follows a young couple on the run from the police in a cinematically rendered American West. In the forlorn seaside city of San Padua, 21-year-old narrator Anne Marie barely scrapes by as a bartender and dog-walker, while trying to shake off memories of her older ex-husband, Cal, a drifter and grifter who disappeared in the middle of the night a year into their marriage. When Cal looks up Anne Marie one evening, she is suddenly thrust back into his chaotic orbit. After a man confronts Cal over money owed to him, the three fight and the man's gun goes off, killing him. Anne Marie and Cal then flee and embark on an expansive, circuitous road trip. McFarlane's burnished prose is steeped in the hard-edged funk of dirty realism ("Outstretched hands waved and pushed crumpled bills at me and I pulled pints and gave them out sticky-handed"), but Anne Marie's character remains frustratingly oblique. Vague memories emerge of Anne Marie's troubled relationship with her mother, who died when Anne Marie was 15, rendering her protagonist's hard-knock life through painful flashes that contribute to the mood but fail to illuminate. Though the novel aptly captures the characters' sense of aimlessness, it loses its own way.
