There are stories that are such clear distillations of a time and place and experience that one can’t picture them happening anywhere else or to anyone else. Not all works are of such a singular nature--one can pluck Juliet or Hamlet from Verona or Denmark and slap them down in south Florida or behind the handlebars of a Harley, and we’ve got a new, fresh take on the source material. The magic of Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen is of an opposite but perhaps equal variety. Though elements of their story are absolutely universal, Marjorie, Natalie, and Lamont cannot exist anywhere but 1980s Oklahoma, and the specificity of their story is what is so appealing.
Before I begin to wax on about muscle cars and fast food drive-thrus[1], a few words must be said about the literary device O’Nan employs to tell Marjorie’s story. The book is written in the first person, but the conceit is that Marjorie is sitting on death row the day before her execution, recording tapes that will be used by none other than Stephen King to write a book about the Mach 6 killers from her perspective. This device is brilliant on several levels.
First, the device provides a clear motivation for Marjorie to tell the story of her life, from her childhood dog Jody-Jo to that last police chase. Never once do we question why Marjorie’s talking about some aspect of her upbringing, because we know she’s been given a set of questions from Mr. King himself that she’s supposed to be answering, and her answers become even more introspective, and revealing, due to this conceit. In fact listening to her wrestle with the questions, in her own words, does a gorgeously subtle job of painting her as an unreliable narrator (as when she calls her high school experience “pretty normal” and then proceeds to talk about her experiences with drink and drugs, or when she states emphatically she never got drunk while pregnant and then tells a story about being drunk while pregnant).
Second, Marjorie’s story is occasionally interrupted by a guard coming by, or someone yelling from another cell. Not only does this serve to put the reader right behind bars with her, it gives us all sorts of interesting background details on what life is like for four women on death row.
Third, the conceit provides further grounding in time and place because of the implication that Stephen King is trying his hand at a crime novel. Stephen King is still a genre giant today, but he was both absolutely massive in the ‘80s and still relatively new.. O’Nan could have made the author on the other end anonymous or pseudonymous, but simply the mention of Stephen King helps to call to mind the era. Plus, it’s fun.
Why does this story need to be set in the midwest in the 1980s? It’s ultimately a story about boredom that never manages to be boring, a cautionary tale about the dangers of under-stimulation to a restless populace. Boredom is a theme that comes up again and again while Marjorie relates her tale, from the highways of Oklahoma to death row, a place where the women’s efforts to occupy themselves until the end dovetail nicely with the youthful ennui that landed at least Marjorie, and probably most of her compatriots, there. While boredom might be a universal impulse that manifests itself in diverse populations in every variation from 4H club membership to suicide bombings, the ‘80s in the midwest offers up a particularly peculiar cocktail of sources of boredom and antidotes.
There’s the landscape, of course. Vast, unending, and pretty damned flat. When the very earth beneath your feet is boring, it’s hard for anything particularly interesting to grow in that soil, thus you have a series of small towns without a lot going on, populated by people without a lot going on, either. And then there’s the decade itself. ‘80s nostalgia aside, the turbulence of the sixties and seventies led to a bit of a cultural hangover that lasted all the way up until 9/11. All those factors conspire to induce a special kind of boredom in everyone we meet, with deadly consequences.
Marjorie has little in the way of opportunity or stimulation available to her. No Internet, or course, and few activities other than driving around and doing drugs. While she clearly has an innate predilection towards addiction, it’s hard to imagine her running quite so headlong into the arms of drink and drugs, and at such an early age, if she were born into a more fascinating region or decade. Drugs and boredom are a powerful combination. Throw cars into the mix and things get quite combustible.
Being given a powerful machine and nothing to do is much like hitting puberty. All of a sudden you’ve got 400 horses under the hood and nowhere to turn it loose. The American muscle car represents a certain kind of freedom, sure, but also a certain kind of entertainment. Much of Marjorie and Lamont’s lives revolve around cars. Fixing cars, finding car parts, driving to car shows. Going out on the town and meeting up with a bunch of other gearheads at the malt shop. Again, O’Nan conjures up a special kind of geographical and temporal magic here, confirming once more why this story must take place in ‘80s Oklahoma. Unlike the sixties, these machines are now old enough to be mythologized. To be collector’s items. To empower and sustain a subculture. And since there aren’t gas shortages, there’s nothing stopping anyone from swallowing a few Black Beauties, popping in a Ramones 8-track, and driving all night.
The Speed Queen idles quite comfortably at the intersection of universality and specificity. We can identify with Marjorie, surely. But her life is only one we can sympathize with, not quite live for ourselves, the same way she drives with a finger and an atlas while waiting for the executioner. And the care taken to create this paradigm is something authors of crime fiction, and indeed any writer looking to solidly ground their novel in time and place, to the extent the story cannot happen anywhere else, should note.
[1] Only footnote, I promise--how brilliant an analogue for Sonic-style restaurants is O’Nan’s Mach 6? As someone who sends his hungry characters to their local Fasmart for a Pizza Pouch on occasion, I’m jealous.