Highway Blue By Ailsa McFarlane / Anne Marie and Cal

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Highway Blue

By Ailsa McFarlane

McFarlane’s dreamy if tepid debut follows a young couple on the run from the police in a cinematically rendered American West. In the forlorn seaside city of San Padua, 21-year-old narrator Anne Marie barely scrapes by as a bartender and dog-walker, while trying to shake off memories of her older ex-husband, Cal, a drifter and grifter who disappeared in the middle of the night a year into their marriage. When Cal looks up Anne Marie one evening, she is suddenly thrust back into his chaotic orbit. After a man confronts Cal over money owed to him, the three fight and the man’s gun goes off, killing him. Anne Marie and Cal then flee and embark on an expansive, circuitous road trip. McFarlane’s burnished prose is steeped in the hard-edged funk of dirty realism (“Outstretched hands waved and pushed crumpled bills at me and I pulled pints and gave them out sticky-handed”), but Anne Marie’s character remains frustratingly oblique. Vague memories emerge of Anne Marie’s troubled relationship with her mother, who died when Anne Marie was 15, rendering her protagonist’s hard-knock life through painful flashes that contribute to the mood but fail to illuminate. Though the novel aptly captures the characters’ sense of aimlessness, it loses its own way.

PW