Pig Iron

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

While Davies’s eighth work of fiction is not quite another Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), the central metaphor of life as
machine is not lost on the reader. A team of troubled seekers assembles
in the northern part of the United States to build a 31-foot
“streamliner,” an automobile that will compete for the land speed
record on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. The main character is Mike
Breithaupt, and his recruits on the project include a “California
sheetmetal worker, a misanthropic postman, a teenage millwright, a
failed fashion model, a tap dancer,” and assorted others—each of
whom, in his or her own way, is in the market for a lifestyle overhaul.

One of the problems with Pig Iron is that, most notably in their
dialogue, the characters are poorly delineated: ideas that are put forth
in chapter after chapter, although narrated by different crew members,
sound too much alike, so that the possibility of uniqueness—of
individuality—is pretty well lost. This is a shame, because there are,
in fact, ideas to be conveyed, and the collective ethos of Davies’s
band of misfit mechanics is worthy of an audience. There are forces at
work within this group: while they build and eventually race their car
through the desolate landscape, something of their spirit is freed.