Zen Master of Infidelity

Halfway through this intense but ungainly memoir Anthony Swofford describes being enraged at his father and taking his fury out in his driving, as he guns his BMW M3 down an upstate New York highway, ripping through its gears, “an angry man in a sick-fast car,” doing twice the 45 m.p.h. speed limit. “In front of me was about two miles of mostly straight road,” he writes, “and I killed it, I chewed it up, the speedo climbed to 90, and then 105, and then 120, and then 130, and then it hovered and ticked at 133; the world flew by, seasons changed, my heart hung at the edge of the world. I could die, I could kill myself with a flick of my wrist and it would look like a mistake, a daredevil young writer, war veteran, pushing all the limits at once and doing a header into a tree with his $65,000 car.”