Title: Learning to drive
First published: 1996
Description: Julian Orr is a busy man. Not only on staff at the fashion magazine View, Julian also writes a gossip column for a New York tabloid, chronicling the glitzy world of perfume launches, promotional parties, and the other fabulous events that are of such paramount importance to the chic Manhattan crowd in the late 80s. Julian, it seems, has successfully managed to turn his back on a painful childhood, until, at the urging of his therapist, he takes time out of his hectic schedule to learn how to drive.

A license will allow the thirty-seven-year-old Julian to visit his parents' graves in Goldenrod, Connecticut, where they are buried in the Jewish cemetery just outside of town - a town that he hasn't seen for nearly twenty years.

On the day of his road test, Julian is matched with a temperamental instructor named Hector. The two men find themselves trapped in the claustrophobic confines of the car - exacerbated by the stifling New York heat - unable to find their destination. What begins as an innocent act of liberation by a man struggling to come to terms with his past turns into a nightmarish series of events that soon escalates out of control.
Subjects: New York Times reviewed, Fiction, general
LC classification: PS3564.O778 L43 1996