How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

Starred review from June 6, 2011
Writing to save your lifeâand your 1971 Volkswagenâis at the heart of this wildly imaginative debut. The car isn't just like a son to the narrator, it is his son. A series of whimsical adventures set in Northampton, Mass., find memory and fiction assuming anthropomorphic dimensions and rules about "parts and action... changing and changing back, with no warning." Raising a Beetle involves feeding it the crazy stories of characters like the Memory of My Father, named after the narrator's real father, who was killed by a Heart Attack Tree one morning in Amherst; a mother who is actually two characters (the One Side of My Mother complains to the television; the Other Side of My Mother cleans up the kitchen); an array of nettlesome former girlfriends such as the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, whose shattered bits, used to fix one of the Beetle's "eyes," brilliantly "broadcast" her hues "onto the roads of Northampton"; and of course the Beetle himself, a mischievous fellow indeed. Boucher brings even more formal fun to the mix by basing his book on the famous 1969 manual by John Muir. Readers are in for a fresh, memorable ride with this inventive "collage of loss."

August 1, 2011
Reminiscent of Richard Brautigan's psychedelic cult novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), Boucher's weird and funny debut is set in a zany, modern-day western Massachusetts, where time is literally money, inanimate objects walk and talk, words take on new meaning, and, like the narrator's ever-shifting metaphors, the landscape alters its form at will. Based on a veritable hippie bible, a 1969 Volkswagen maintenance manual, Boucher's loosely structured, surreal interpretation portrays a man struggling to raise his sickly, illegitimate son, a 1971 VW Beetle (he often vomits oil) who was born shortly after the narrator's father was abducted and killed by a Heart Attack Tree. When the narrator sets out to investigate his father's death, his attempts to save time to heal his ailing son result in one long how-to on fatherhood. His misadventures lead him to sell and soon forget his name, date a beautiful woman made of stained glass, and fail as a journalist. With wicked, postmodern playfulness and a heart of tenderness, Boucher introduces a supercharged novel that reaffirms the vast and rousing possibilities of fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)