Almost entirely organized around impossible revisions of its own plot ... This makes for a narrative that moves without mercy toward the violent end we know is coming, while at the same time the voice recounting this story is wishing it all away.
Why this epigraph by the contemporary French writer Patrick Autréaux: 'Writing means being led to the one place you’d like to avoid'? The blameless young man driving the car that may have hit Claude revealed to Giraud the final words her husband spoke, but she doesn’t reveal them to us, perhaps because they are too stingingly private. But then why mention it at all? ... Stockwell too often resorts to cardboard jargon in his rendering of Giraud’s French; in one especially impressive feat, he fits three clichés into a single sentence ... It’s something of a mystery how Live Fast has managed to be published as a novel. Nothing in its tenor or tempo, in the style’s manifestation of its subject, in the plinths and joists of its armature, in its overall narrative temperature and weight, suggests novel — it all overwhelmingly suggests memoir ... A small, crushing masterpiece of grief. Giraud does what the best autobiographical writers have always done: Through the vista of her personal calamity, she incites you to apprehend your own world with a bursting freshness you didn’t know you needed.
Clocking in at a snappy 159 pages, this is one of those rare books that works in two directions. It pulls you completely into its reality — believe me, it's a page turner — but also sends you back out into the mystery of living. It gets you pondering your own losses and how you deal with all those what-ifs that rise up in every life.
