It is possible to find yourself in the most banal of circumstances, but the truth is, most of the big epiphanic moments usually only take place when you’re plucked out of your day-to-day existence and thrust, whether by accident or design, into somewhere wholly and extraordinarily different.
For most of us it is wholly accidental, a glitch in our well laid plans that sees us careering us somewhere we don’t want to be but where, it turns out, we may just need to be to heal our lives or provide insight we desperately but didn’t know we wanted.
In Colleen Oakley’s brilliantly transportative – literally and emotionally; it ticks all the boxes – novel, The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise (and yes the title is a tip of the hat to that iconic movie), the trip into big life moment revelations takes place partly by design, and partly by accident, with two wholly different people heading off on a grand adventure that could fundamentally change their lives.
Whether it’s for the better or not, is not entirely clear when feisty 84-year-old Louise, acerbic in tongue and most definitely not in need of any kind of care (so she thinks), bursts into the room at 1 a.m. of her carer, 21-year-old Tanner Quimby who simply wants to drive her reluctant employer to where she needs to go and spend the rest of the time playing video games, the better to block out the terrible direction her once-promising young athletic life has taken.
In short, she [Louise] had come to believe she had finally gotten away with it, once and for all. But having spent the formative years of her childhood on a farm, she of all people knew: Chickens always come home to roost.
And even in the grips of her waning shock and rising fear, she couldn’t help but recognize the amusing irony: that now, when she could barely walk–she was going to have to run.
Neither wants to be in the other’s presence, but when Tanner’s given seconds to decide to join Louise on the road – to be clear, Louise needs Tanner to drive her so it’s hardly a cry for companionship and more an acceptance of the pragmatically necessary – she decides to go with her irascible, near monosyllabic object of care, if only because she’s offered exactly the amount of money she needs to return to college after an accident took away her sporting scholarship.
In other words, they’re only on the run with each other, quite possibly from the FBI and the police who believe Louise is a jewel thief responsible for a cold case heist in the mid-70s, because each needs the other, a mutual arrangement neither is thrilled about it and which if circumstances were different, they drop like hot stones in the southern U.S. sun.
But as they race out of Atlanta, Georgia in a sleek vintage green Jaguar, something quite remarkable happens – they discover that maybe, just maybe, they might like each other and that this fast-paced adventure across the United States to California where Louise is desperate to find her old friend George before something terrible happens to them – quite what, Tanner doesn’t know, but it makes stopping to play tourist on the way yet another thing that makes Louise characteristically abrupt and snarky – could be the making of two people who have reached points in their remarkably different lives where they needs things to change.
Not that either Louise nor Tanner’s going to admit that in a hurry.
Tanner is miserable, having lost her future to a snap-second decision that cost a professional sporting future, and Louise, always independent and more than willing to look after herself while taking on the patriarchy (even as she was married to the same man for forty or so years), is furious that her life is no longer hers to fully control, and yet, neither seems inclined to do what’s necessary to fix what’s ailing.
Sure, Louise goes on the road, dragging Tanner with her, but that’s less about facing personal demons than about saving something important from her past, but somehow in the midst of the pell-mell, romping trip across the U.S. that forms the fun but emotionally meaningful spine of The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise, a weird kind of on-the-road therapy happens, with some epiphanies of meaning and purposes finding their way into a journey borne of time-sensitive necessity.
One of the great joys of The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise is the relationship between Louise, who takes no prisoners in just about everything she does though she does have a soundly beating good heart beneath the octogenarian snark and swagger, and Tanner who implodes when her dream dies, unwilling to face what it means for her future, and so lost in her pain and grief that she alienates everyone she loves.
These are two of the most unlikely people you’d shove together but it works an absolute treat in this marvellously entertaining book, with two souls who might seem utterly divorced and different from each other but who need the same thing – to be connected, to make peace with their pasts and walk towards the future, whatever that might be, and to admit they have broken parts that need healing.
‘No. Tanner’s pretty predictable.’
‘Mm,’ Candace murmured. She may have thought that at one time about her daughter, too, but now … she wasn’t so sure.
Left to their own everyday devices, they’d likely do nothing about it, but when the rubber literally hits the road and pedal is very much applied to metal, and The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise really gets going, they find themselves facing up to all kind of home truths and actually doing something about them.
Told with vivacity and earthy wit, and with a keen eye on the way life can surprise and delight you even at your time of greatest need, the giddy joys of The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise are many, from characters who come exuberantly and yet affectingly live with dialogue that shimmers and sparkles and plot points that are as hilarious as they are tense, a quirky, rule-breaking approach to life (Louise) that makes a major impression on someone who’s always done the right thing (Tanner, who isn’t sure all that compliance has really worked for her) right through to an ending that has all the feels and some fantastically wonderful surprises.
Celebrating friendship, integrity, boots-on-ground humanity and the buoyant support and love of family in all its dysfunctional guises, The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise is that rare and delightful thing – a novel that is an absolute blast to read, full of epic moments and big ticket points of decision, but also emotionally insightful, raw and intimate that neatly folds the adventurous and the cautious in together and creates the road trip for the ages that might just be the best thing to happen to either of the titular characters.