![]() ![]() Will’s colorful list of chores and assignments in Chaon’s tweaked America includes “transporting prisoners, delivering packages, planting explosives, spying, guarding abandoned factories, cleaning up millionaires’ compounds after bloody massacres, assassinating minor people.” This sort of character is usually reserved for revenge flicks and Florida crime blotters, but Chaon, no stranger to genre mash-ups, brings a more literary sensibility to the proceedings, endowing his protagonist with a sweet disposition and a gently comic voice. Chaon taps into the prurient thrill of riding shotgun with the unpredictable, and the question dawns: Just how lawless and unhinged will the world of “Sleepwalk” get? The mystery, the moral audacity, the sense that anything is possible in these early pages refreshes not only the hit-man trope but also the world itself. Chaon creates a daring irony in the disconnect between the road warrior’s self-deceit and the reader’s skepticism. I picture a movie star and her kindly, infertile husband, or some gay guys in short-sleeved shirts, hoping to make themselves a family in Minneapolis, and I picture them walking along through that rose garden in Lyndale Park with a toddler between them, and they pass that big pretty fountain with the cherubs on it and they let him dangle his feet in the water.” “I like the idea that I’ll pass the little guy off to someone who will sell him to some nice wealthy couple who will raise him as their own son. Here he is justifying his role in human trafficking: The end-user is too terrifying to contemplate and quickly provokes in Will a soothing stream of delusions. Will won’t have any real misgivings about his line of work until his next assignment, when the trade-off involves far more innocent fare: a 3-week-old baby. But Liandro is in no mood, and his weeping turns intense. Will does his best to keep things light, supplying Liandro with hits from a blunt and offering to play board games with him in their downtime as the two head east through the Bonneville Salt Flats. The particulars of Liandro’s debt are as vague as the future awaiting him, though to tell by the ankle shackles and the many tears shed, Liandro isn’t optimistic. He employs Hoke Coleburn, much to her chagrin.“Sleepwalk,” Dan Chaon’s fourth novel, begins with the mercenary Will Bear, a mild-mannered Mad Max in a tricked-out camper van, delivering a debtor named Liandro into the hands of his creditor. ![]() When Daisy Wertham, a stubborn, elderly Southern widow, crashes her new car into the neighbor’s garage, her son, Boolie, forces her to take on a chauffeur. ![]() It’s also a challenge for local actors (or any actors) to step into the shoes of iconic past performances, but the excellent Shelley Walljasper (as Daisy) and Joseph Obleton (as her driver Hoke) make you forget all about Tandy and Freeman, somehow making it look easy.ĭirected with the utmost care and class (with a spot-on string soundtrack) by Jeremy Littlejohn, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play is set in Atlanta and spans 25 years, from 1948 to 1973. At the 62nd Academy Awards, “Driving Miss Daisy” earned nine nominations, and won four: Best Picture, Best Actress (for Tandy), Best Makeup, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The 1989 film - directed by Bruce Beresford, with a screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his 1987 play - starred Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. ![]() Daisy (Shelley Walljasper) and Hoke (Joe Obleton) face off in “Driving Miss Daisy,” running through Feb. ![]()
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