Reviewed by Lina Patton

In Kate Wisel's debut story collection, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize selected by Min Jin Lee, pain is inevitable. It comes to Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Natalya, the four women among which these stories rotate, in all forms and phases of life—from the stinging slap of a lover to the impending death of a mother to the sharp bite of the Boston cold. But this collection is not a stock image portrait of pain. There are no cheap shots to the heart here. Rather, the way in which Wisel portrays multifaceted suffering in this searing drum of a book is more beautiful, strategic, and empowering than one may expect.

The girls love each other fiercely, and in many ways, they serve as extensions of one another. While the collection is broken into sections by character, the very first story is told from the first-person plural perspective, introducing the theme of the girls as one singular unit in a way reminiscent of Justin Torres's We the Animals. The second story, "Frankie," builds upon this theme, as Serena explains her relationship to her best friend: "I need you like my morning cigarette," she texts her as she speeds along the highway with a new guy; "I need you like Tylenol PM." The girls are each other's coping mechanism, their daily antidote to loneliness and grief, but even more important is that while distinct, they still serve as mirrors of each other, and are often only kind to themselves through one another. "Stop being sad," Frankie tells Serena one night, and one can almost hear the words reverberated back to herself, Frankie's own internal whisper. 

As such, the girls—and the reader—feel safest when they are together. The stories of when they are younger and more in touch, moving from apartment to apartment and smoking together in the bathtub, feel the lightest. While some may argue this lightness could relate to age, even in their younger years, the girls aren't naive. They encounter pain from the very beginning via broken families and broken bones, abortions and dreams of college that "[break] apart like an iceberg." Instead, at all stages, it is when they are separated that the pain seems to dig deepest, and as a result, when a familiar name appears on the page, one often feels a sigh of relief in the same way the characters must. For example, when Natalya is driving around with an older, now-homeless ex and they pick up Raffa and Serena from English High, the tension lifts, if only for a moment. And later, as thirty-year-old Raffa works for a horrific, chauvinistic boss, there is a breath of air when she meets Serena for lunch and Serena gives her the "worried-eye lock." 

Still, the girls can only lift each other up so much, and the majority of the stories focus on their separate lives as they navigate their own paths and volatile relationships. Most stories involve abusive men in some role—whether lovers, husbands, fathers, or something in between—although even through all the cracked ribs and swollen eyes, the condescension and lies, it is not simple enough to paint the men as the bad guys. "Not all men are dicks," Raffa says in "When I Call, You Answer," "I wish it were that simple." Yet it's interesting to note this specific sentiment comes from Raffa, who has the only story in the collection with the closest experience to pure, romantic love. In "Benny's Bed," one of the collection's most heartbreaking stories, Raffa continues to visit the home of her childhood friend and first love who died of an overdose.

Regardless, most of the men in this collection do behave like dicks. Serena's boyfriend abandons her at a tattoo parlor, Natalya's swipes at the back of her legs, Frankie's makes her feel like a "broken toll." Even secondary male characters—the dads of the kids they babysit, high school teachers and courtroom lawyers—all have the power, and all use it against the collection's central female characters. But what makes the abuse more complex is the girls' participation and self-awareness throughout it all. While still sympathetic, one also gets the feeling that pain has become almost nostalgic to our protagonists; they have grown up with such fear and hurt, that while they try to escape it, some instinctive self tends to continue its chase. When Villy, a sleazy, poor, yet pretentious man invites Frankie to leave her job at the bar and go out with him, she hears "this other girl inside [her] say, 'Sure.'" And when Serena finally dates a man who does not physically abuse her, she realizes, "she was with him because he wouldn't hit [her]," and she leaves him for the same reason.

On the surface, because of this cycle of self-harm, these characters may sound unlikeable—just another round of manic girls thriving in and showcasing their disasters, referring to themselves as a hot mess, but Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Natalya would laugh at those girls. They do not brag about their pain; if anything, even as they accept it, they try to hide it, only letting it rise through them in the form of wisdom—how they understand people, the world. This is their saving grace: these girls are smart, and deep down, they know it, too. They all want more. Even as she awaits her domestic abuse hearing, Serena writes endless observations in the front flap of her book, fantasizing about the judge finding it and recognizing "[she] was that bright." Natalya, in a moment of crisis, stares at her own hand in front of her face and feels "the power . . . from the tips of her fingers, her identity." Frankie, with her endless work ethic, endures thankless job after thankless job, determined to continue school and study Human Development. And Raffa, who edges down various roads of disaster, always pulls herself back, because as she once says in regard to her husband, "I want more than he knows."

For this reason, one never gives up hope for these characters. Their underlying strength, coupled with a deep understanding of their trauma and likewise coupled with the structure of the collection—which jumps in time, perspective, and style—show these women will never stop moving, never stop trying. While their efforts may be slow—there are multiple references to a "false sensation of moving forward" and "facing backward, going forward"—and while pain may catch at their heels, they won't stand still. Because ultimately, as Serena coos to a crying baby on a plane, it's better to "keep screaming." At least then, you know you're alive.

Written in ferocious, cutting prose, this book is—as Frankie once described of Natalya—"a beauty so rough that it's pretty," and it is not one to be missed.