BOOK
Plato's Garage, Rob Campbell's collection of some 20-odd essays on the car, starts from the precept that for many of us, the significant episodes in our lives are measured in odometer clicks, with memory and meaning stretched like points on a road atlas. Cars do more than provide the connective tissue - they are, to dust off McLuhan's phrase, "extensions of man."
In "Gray Area Guru," Campbell profiles Pippa Garner, a San Francisco Bay Area "artist, scientist, inventor, and mechanical savant" who went from performing outlandish modifications on cars (one overhaul merged a 1967 Buick LeSabre with a boat) to a much more intimate modification: turning himself into herself. "I felt like becoming a middle-aged man had become such an inevitability," she tells the author, "that I couldn't keep that concept alive." The story is a new twist on the fabled midlife crisis in which an aging male seeks rejuvenation through the purchase of a Porsche; here, body becomes car, in a sense, with identity altered by upgrading to a better model.
In one of the book's most interesting (and personal) essays, "Sun Fun Play Stay," Campbell revisits his youth in Bakersfield, California, a coming of age marked by determining where he would cruise. The story delineates his social geography with a range of identities - Stoner Dropouts, Angry Young Men, Cowboy Jock Types - segregated by style and by car. And just as in Prince's "Little Red Corvette," cars engendered their own autoeroticism. A cruising trip in his parents' Volkswagen diesel van would, as he recounts, attract a far different crowd than his usual desultory loops in his stepfather's 1976 brown-with-orange-racing-stripes Pinto.
With the book's title, Campbell echoes Plato's allegory of the cave, the philosopher's tale of the shadows reflected on cavern walls confused for outside reality. Campbell wants to get out of his own garage, as it were, examining himself as he examines the personal relationships people have with their automobiles. This can be slippery terrain, and Campbell occasionally lapses into overheated metaphors that equate driving with life (U-turns and the like) and a lazy, pedestrian prose that undercuts the poignancy of his memories and experiences.
Plato's Garage succeeds on another level, however, through Campbell's mordant observations on the idiosyncrasies of life in autopia. Out on the highways, cars become people, people become their cars, and the lines all get a little blurred.
Plato's Garage by Rob Campbell: $23.95. St. Martin's Press: (888) 330 8477,www.stmartins.com.
STREET CRED
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The Drive to Drive
Bot-Conquest
Is That a V Series in Your Pocket ...
Scripting With Sharks
A Brighter Idea
This Life's for You
Read Me
Music
Meat and Greet
The Rite Stuff at JPL
Headset Smasher
Thief of Arts
Just Outta Beta
Think Small
Finding the Fast Lane Fast
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