First Fiction

Drive Like Hell

A Novel

Dallas Hudgens

Scribner: 336 pp., $23

I approached “Drive Like Hell” with a certain wariness. There was a Chevelle Super Sport in midair on the cover, the characters were named Luke, Cash and Wade, and I thought I smelled the distinctive Dixie-fried perfume of a “Dukes of Hazzard” retread.

Well, the Brothers Duke could conceivably hail from the same pocket of rural Georgia as Luke Fulmer, the novel’s 16-year-old narrator. And all three share the wounded pride and automotive fixation of the American South circa 1979: “We were in the dark age of economy cars and oil embargoes. It was not a great time to get a driver’s license or steal a car. And, sadly, this had all come about while our former governor, Mr. Jimmy Carter, was occupying the White House.”

Yet Dallas Hudgens has a good deal more up his sleeve. For starters, he puts his own peculiar spin on the coming-of-age story. Luke’s father, a hard-drinking mechanic who plainly never heard of the concept of the designated driver, had vanished years earlier. That leaves his mother, Claudia, who can’t find a man worth standing by, and his older brother, Nick, an engaging ex-con and dope dealer. There’s not a role model in sight. Only TV truly teaches Luke how to live: Jim Rockford, or possibly Barney Fife, is the father he never had.

Hudgens delivers an ambling, shaggy-dog plot, cameo appearances by Paul Newman and Jack Nicklaus, plus a missing duffel bag of cocaine that threatens to put both Fulmer siblings behind bars. Even more notable, though, is the author’s ear for the snappy one-liner. A guy running his fingers over the fresh scratches on his borrowed van “looked like a faith healer, only without the faith.” Nick writes off the “hillbilly sport” of automobile racing with almost clinical disdain: “You start combining all that inbreeding with exhaust fumes, and people just don’t act right.” Yes, Hudgens does wrestle with the occasional cliche, but usually he pins it to the mat.

He also makes the story count. Claudia, we’re told, prefers the classic country to the current Nashville pablum: “She liked the twang and the heartbreak and people talking about killing their lovers.” Nobody gets killed here, but the twang and the heartbreak are real. Hank Williams would be proud, and deeply amused.

*

The Almond Picker

A Novel

Simonetta Agnello Hornby

Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 318 pp., $23

Given its diminutive size, Sicily has produced an astonishing crop of writers, including Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello and Leonardo Sciascia. Artists of this caliber don’t really travel in schools. But what these Sicilian masters have in common is a skeptical view of human goodness and a surprising tenderness for those on the lower, slippery rungs of the social ladder.

In this sense, Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s “The Almond Picker” is a classic Sicilian novel. The eponymous heroine, Mennulara, has spent her entire adult life as a servant to the wealthy Alfallipe clan -- but it’s clear from the opening chapter that she has wrapped this dynasty of spoiled whiners around her little finger. It’s also clear that Mennulara, who dies on the first page, has left behind a clutch of mysteries. How did a lowly servant become so rich? Where has she hidden her assets? Whom did she love?

In time, the gossipy inhabitants of Roccacolomba manage to untangle most of these riddles. Yet they are hindered at every step by “that ability to dissimulate thoughts and feelings that Sicilians imbibe with their mother’s milk.” Omerta -- the Mafia’s conspiratorial code of silence -- is in fact something of a national sport.

Meanwhile, Hornby has strewn other obstacles in the reader’s path. One is the enormous cast: She introduces no fewer than 67 characters in a preliminary thumbnail, and I spent considerable time just distinguishing Don Paolino Annunziata (“retired chauffeur”) from Don Luigi Speciale (“former chauffeur”). A bigger pitfall is her anonymous prose, for which I don’t think we can blame the reliable translator Alastair McEwen. Hornby simply lacks the bite, the bittersweet accuracy, to lift this novel into the upper echelons. It’s good but not great -- which means that Verga, Pirandello and Sciascia can hold on to their crowns for the moment.