Lee Casey is a narrator we’ve all had the pleasure (or, perhaps, lack thereof) of being. Usually, when we are this person we are at the worst bar in the neighborhood, drinking the cheapest drink, doing some soul self-loathing while being rejected by the only other woman in the bar. Lee Casey is that person in that moment, Lee Casey is that person every moment.
Other than playing in a band, Lee doesn’t have a lot going for him. Smith creates the ultimate relatable person who we see to much of ourselves in, by showing Lee commit a number of tedious, manual labor jobs, only to find solace in time with friends outside of the existence of work. After an overdose by a friend, Lee reevaluates what is important in his life. And, just by some sort of chance encounter from one side of the afterlife, he meets two girls, K Neon and June Doom.
These girls – two polar opposites of each other but both representing a different breed of perfection. They bleed onto the page with realism, Smith creates the kind of girls we all knew and wished we could have dated. Here, Lee finds himself in the fantasy many people dream of – the attention of three girls both of whom love him and he loves too. But this is where Smith really evolves, rather than writing a novel about this down and out guy who wins everything, it’s seeded with realities and witty dialogue that keep it fresh, true to life, like a Bukowski novel that we never got to read. Casey eventually discovers that the ideal situation of sharing a bed with two people isn’t as nice as being able to truly commit to one person. Casey begins to search for the deeper meaning in his life, the step forward out of the pool of the mundane that he has soaked in for so long, he isn’t sure if his hands will ever recover from it, always be withered like prunes from the day to day grind.
Yet, a heroic tale about the underdog is never excluding to anyone. There are characters we love, others we hate. Dialogue so sharp it’s like the conversations we wish we could have, no more L’esprit de l’escalier for us, because we get to see the words as they should be, in the pages of this novel. F250 may just be the book for somebody who is in a life crisis, stuck in the mundane and not sure what way to go out. It isn’t some sort of Zen and the art of figuring it all out guide, but it sure does the job of making somebody feel like they’re not alone.
Ultimately, F250 is a story of somebody who is trying to keep his life together while it is falling apart, and it’s uniquely told, brilliantly written and a pleasure from first page to last. Even if the breaks aren’t working, we still want to jump into that car, right next to Lee Casey with the radio loud.
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