Pages: 486
Publisher:
Red Giant Books
Released:
June 2014
Guest Reviewed by Lavinia Ludlow
Through the Windshield is a commentary on resigning to a life of
routines, sloughing through the seasons eating, drinking, smoking, engaging in
fleeting dialogue with friends and acquaintances, and searching for absolution
from loneliness and isolation in cold comforts like fleeting companionship and
a day at the race track.
Told through
the eyes of Danny, an Ohio cab driver, DeCapite builds and maintains a dismal
tone throughout the book with stream of consciousness prose, and often draws on
things such as weather patterns
and inanimate objects to frame his protagonist’s morose and hopeless state of
mind with:
“After a six-month diet of blues and greys I
was back to white. I was an empty plate.”
“In the center of the room the heavy-bag hung
still, in a kind of quiet conviction. There was a silence about the room that
seemed never to have broken.”
Danny’s approach to
life is classically evasive. He exhibits thinking and behavior widespread in
contemporary society such as numbing himself with mundane errands rather than confront
his lackluster life head-on. His dark and honest passages often reveal how a
lack of ambition and fear of failure can lead to one of the most toxic states
of mind in the human condition, which only further stunts him from rising to
any potential and consequently, sets off a cycle of stagnancy.
“There’s that brief moment of guilt when you realize you’re alive and
don’t know how to live, and you look at the sky and sun and feel like you
should be doing something spontaneous or fulfilling . . . until you find one of
the convenient excuses that’re always waiting for you to do nothing but go
shopping or do the laundry or whatever.”
Occasionally, Danny
breaks from his everyday mundane to make beautiful and often evocative
observations of his world. They are; however, always through a layer of glass:
his cab windshield or his apartment window. This segregation from his
surroundings, and ultimately reality, gives the impression that he’s observing
and living life through the distant view of a telescope.
The 486-page text was
tough to conquer as much of the content is bogged with drab descriptions, list-like
narratives, and inane dialogue between characters in a sort of “I walked here,
I saw this, I thought about that, Ed said this, I ate that, made more coffee,”
which left little to be interpreted by the reader. The narrative also
sporadically switches from first-person narration to informal journal entries
written in lowercase, and dialogues intermittently contain uppercase lettering,
apparently depicting shouting, all of which breaks the somber and poignant tone
DeCapite worked so hard to create.
Through the Windshield is one man’s depiction of how debilitating
and spine-crippling loneliness can be, and how withdrawing into an unfeeling
and mechanical state of mind stunts any possibility of personal, professional,
and emotional growth.
Lavinia Ludlow is a musician, writer, and occasional contortionist. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Her sophomore novel Single Stroke Seven was signed to Casperian Books and will release in the distant future. In her free time, she is a reviewer at Small Press Reviews, The Nervous Breakdown, American Book Review, and now The Next Best Book Blog.
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