Driver

Filice’s rhythmic and searching novel, written mostly in verse, follows an aspiring poet’s new life in contemporary Paris, where he moves from his provincial home to become a train driver. During his monotonous daily routine, the unnamed narrator fantasizes about an alternate life in which, instead of driving a train to a commuter station outside the city, he’s “leisurely... strolling among the bookstalls on the banks of the Seine.” As the narrator acclimates to the job, he mines it for material, such as his colorful depiction of fellow driver Kamal, whom he calls a Casanovist Hoover due to Kamal’s reputation for picking up women along the route (“All his trains become class A explosive materials transport. I doubt he was weaned. Some say you hear Kiss songs when his train goes past the platform”). Filice enhances his descriptions of the train route’s scenery and the narrator’s regimented routines with lines from Apollinaire (“May these waves of bricks come crashing down/ If you were not well loved”), Kendrick Lamar (“Be humble (hol’up hol’up)/ Sit down (hol’up hol’up)”), and many other poets and musicians. It amounts to a distinctive rendering of a young man’s effort to make meaning from his life. (Oct.)