A Novelist-Turned-Cabby Hates His Life. Thanks to Uber, It’s About to Get Worse.

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The novelist Edmund White has observed that a remarkable number of American writers, from Hawthorne to Pynchon, have endured the shock and strain of class descent, and that an entire undercurrent in American fiction is driven by the fear of such a loss in status. Lee Durkee’s disarmingly honest and darkly comic sophomore novel, “The Last Taxi Driver,” is the most recent of these narratives of displacement. The book follows a single, miserable day in the life of Lou Bishoff, a worn-down, middle-aged cabdriver who narrates our story as he chauffeurs the residents of a fictional Mississippi town.

Lou’s fortunes have declined precipitously since his promising start “a few decades ago, back when I was a budding young writer with a swanky Brooklyn girlfriend, back before I went cold on the page and never finished that second novel I’d already been paid for. ” And now things are about to get worse: Uber is coming into town to disrupt what little he has left. Durkee knows whence he speaks: It’s been nearly 20 years since his own acclaimed debut. In between, to make ends meet, he drove a cab.

These are timely concerns, of course. Lou’s rage is palpable from the start, his inner monologue aiming an unrelenting stream of bile at the rotating cast of passengers. This parade of grotesques includes “craven meth heads, spit-cupped bigots, shape-shifted aliens” and “suicide ex-cons,” many of whom “don’t have but three or four teeth in their skulls. ” Not wanting you to get the wrong idea, though, Lou saves the worst of his invective for the “piss-stained frat boy,” the “racist lunatics” and the “scrums of Adderall-vomiting coeds,” as well as the state of Mississippi itself, “50th out of 50.

” It’s an ingenious setup for a novel, promising the reader the perfect vantage point for a panoramic view of society’s crosscurrents at a moment primed for revelatory confession. But deep down, Durkee seems relatively uninterested in the sociological; as Lou’s marathon shift drags on — fueled by stimulants, an anxiety disorder and flashbacks to various traumas — the increasingly fraught encounters end up revealing far more about himself, while his connection with his fares remains cursory at best. After spending half the ride itemizing their inadequacies, the most he has time for is the exchange of some grisly back story, which has to pass for intimacy.