"Where did the knowledge stop and self-loathing begin?", 6 Mar 2005

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Told in alternating chapters and set in Southern Vermont, Cruisers is a portrait of two men, each battling with his own conflicted soul. Both become the prey and the predator, and together they are irrevocably set upon a collision course with one another. Russell Boyd is a Vermont state trooper having doubts about the risks his night-shift job entails. Every night as he traverses the highways and tickets speeders, he wonders whether there are other possibly more serious offenders out there. Falling into the arms of Zofia, his lover, Russell seeks solace from the rigors of the job. But Zofia, a responsible schoolteacher, knows the inherent dangers of Russell's job and hesitates to make a binding pledge to him.

When Zofia becomes pregnant and considers an abortion, Russell is left with a sense of a collision between common sense and his beliefs about what he should do. He tries to decide just what it was he needs to hang on to - was it his grandfathers love or the certainty of what things are like when they go wrong? Plagued by the ineffectual, and haunted by Zofia's worries, Russell feels powerless to stop the tawdry senselessness of his job, which seems to exist in the memory of colours and the half-frozen landscape. Life has left Russell restless and fatigued so he permanently hangs between the two.

Frank Kohler, a thirty-year-old computer repairman, lives alone in the Vermont woods and patrols his property with a fanaticism that borders on the dangerous. Frank is struggling with a "deep and nameless turmoil" and is driven by the angry memories of his murdered mother. In desperation, he decides that love will save him, but since he's too publicly clumsy to court a woman, he orders a mail-order bride from Russia. Frank constantly lives on the edge and the only reason he has been able to survive is by being careful about what he had led himself to remember.

Frank's sense of fragility, which he detested and his closeness to that abyss of sparkling light, steadily becomes worse. Racked with life's claustrophobia, Frank's emotional solace though love is futile, because the dye has already been cast. It is though everything about the world that he couldn't get control of had been there when he found his mother murdered. His new-fangled flashy black sports car and his new Russian bride have unfortunately come to late for him.

Nova steadily builds the tension with a subdued but mighty force. Both men are emotionally disconnected, but they ache to reconnect to those they love. Russell, in an effort to solve the mystery of the murdered woman, goes to the hotel where she was last seen. Frank wonders the fields of his property remembering the battered torso of his mother that was found in a box by the local river. At once refrained, but also quite unnerving and powerful, Nova has a formidable noir style that gradually encapsulates the reader, unadulteratingly revealing the steadfast heart of human quandary and insecurity. Mike Leonard March 05.

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