"The miracle of the modern automobile is not that it sometimes breaks down, but that it serves man well most of the time... It is that for the first time in history it has given free men and women what they most desired: freedom of movement.
Arthur Hailey was a British/Canadian novelist. After working at a number of jobs and writing part-time, he became a writer full-time during 1956, encouraged by the success of the CBC television drama, Flight into Danger (in print as Runway Zero Eight). Following the success of Hotel in 1965, he moved to California; followed by a permanent move to the Bahamas in 1969.
This is the second production novel I'm reading from Arthur Haley. And it is again a multifaceted work, covering many different topics. There's the black kid Rollie Knight, who foolishly went to prison, then got out, and now has no faith in himself, his future, or the society that has repeatedly shown him "his place. By chance, Rollie gets a job, but what kind of job, and what does it all add up to? Sometimes it happens that a man smith of his own happiness, but sometimes the millstone of fate and the world can grind it like a grain of sand.
There's the married couple - a 25-year-old girl, Erika, and her husband, Adam, who is older than her and holds a high position in an automobile factory (one of the very giants of the "Big Three"). With her husband increasingly absent at work and coming home, hastily eating his dinner and plunging back into his papers, Erika feels unwanted and unloved. She recalls the first years of their marriage, how gentle and attentive he was to her, but now she sees only a busy outsider man, once so dear, who has no time for anything, not even for her. Bored and lonely, she goes on all sorts of adventures, even meeting a not very nice man in a motel and committing a spontaneous shoplifting, even though she has plenty of money in her purse.
A widowed man, Matt, also works in a factory in a good position. He has a grown daughter, Barbara, who is dating a young designer, Brett. Brett doesn't like her father at all. Neither does Matt like his daughter's advanced views. "They have no respect for parents, the government, or the establishment..." Though, of course, he's not quite right. Barbara just notices those who are worse off, who were born "with the wrong skin color," and is also too busy with her job (her father, on the other hand, preferred her to run the household and take care of him after her mother's death).
There's the car salesman who's building his business in ways that aren't quite legal, the right way. Somewhere he cheats on taxes, somewhere he sells cars retroactively, somewhere he applies the tricks of an experienced marketer, playing on the psychology of buyers. In his spare time he also has a racing driver, Pierre, a woman's favourite, a man-lover of life, a sort of firecracker.
There is also the so-called "white negro". A black man who has made it "in the world". He tries to help his black brethren, makes sure that those who work in the factory are not cheated of their pay. He even visits some workers and gives them alarm clocks so they don't oversleep their shifts.
A lot of the flip side of everything to do with the auto industry. Many workers missed Mondays and Fridays (some were still drinking, and some got drunk before the end of the work week). So the best cars were produced on Wednesday, sometimes Thursday. And there was already a line of privileged buyers for them: those who would pay well or friends and relatives of those who worked at the factory.
These 460 pages are a global canvas of human destinies, in some places very detailed. Somewhere it gets a little boring, somewhere too morally difficult to read further. For some people this job is hell, just to earn money for food, for some people it is the endless whirlwind that wears down the body the higher you climb; for some people it is a dream, a life's work; for others it is a place to pull off criminal affairs.
In general, and about love, and poignant, and social problems that are always in life, in one way or another. Just about the fates of people, "small" and "big," some more "important and needed," some pushed into a quiet and gloomy corner of life. About choices, the very ones we make every day. About the roads that snake under our feet: here we're still not bad people, and then suddenly someone betrayed, here we forgot to call our parents, and here we did not notice that a loved one lives and breathes next to us, the one that "in sorrow and in joy" ...
On that note, I go live my life and make choices. Everyday. Are you with me?
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