Made Entertaiment on Your Car

In The Patron Saint of Used Cars and Second Chances, Mark Millhone details his excruciating domestic tumult–son gets bit by family dog, younger son develops serious case of pneumonia, wife is stressed out and taking out her emotions on husband. He escapes his Marriage Inferno by getting addicted to EBay Motors where he spends hour upon hour after work scouring the website in his quest to find the Ultimate Transcendence Car, one that will take him away from all his woes. When he wins a bid on a cherry BMW 7 series and must fly to Dallas and drive back with his father, he uses the road trip to reconnect with his stoical, wise 1950s era father who keeps his son, prone to manic euphoria, tethered to reality.

While I like the premise and can identify with Millhone’s consumer obsession–especially one for cars–I find the book has three major flaws. Stylistically, the book shows off Mullhone’s writing skills. But Mullhone’s fondness for humorous hyperbole is excessive and tiring and betrays a sentimentality that doesn’t bode well for this chimera quest. My second problem is that I never believe in the urgency of Millhone’s car quest. The book’s sentimental tone sugar-coats any desperate demons that might propel someone to compulsively buy a 1994 BMW 7 series on an Internet auction (though I do believe the quest was really a plan to be with his father. That part he does well). Finally, at 192 pages, the book feels padded. An autobiographical essay would have had a more effective, distilled quality, but over a book-length landscape I can see Mullhone, the professional deft writer, using his skill to pad his essay into a book.

At times there are funny jokes, moments of wisdom, and effective meditations on the pursuit of a chimera, but diluted over 192 pages and generally sentimental and “sweet” in tone, the book lacks the rancorous bite promised by its pungent premise.

However, I don’t wish to dissuade everyone from reading The Patron Saint of Used Car. Those who enjoyed Bill Bryon’s memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (similar in tone but for me it works better) may find enough similarities in Millhone’s memoir to make it worth reading.
Rating: 3 / 5

I appreciated the author’s sense of humor and his ability to describe some of the feelings he experienced during the various tragedies that preceded his road trip to pick up the car. However, I ultimately found the book rather unsatisfying, for essentially one reason: it feels very artificial. It feels as if the author said to himself, “I want to write a story about all the bad s**t that happened to me and how it almost destroyed my marriage but ultimately we recovered…but I need some sort of hook…oh I know, I’ll structure the whole thing around the trip I took with my Dad to pick up that car in Texas.”

The book alternates between a relatively dry account of the road trip with the author’s father (with intermittent flashes of humor about his father’s inability to communicate or experience his feelings…which gets a little old) and episodes from the author’s traumatic “year from Hell” and traumatic upbringing by an absent father and (from his description) mentally ill mother. The cover blurb bills this road trip as a “comedy of errors,” (not so much, by the way) as well as the thing that gives the author the perspective to save his foundering marriage.

But it all feels very contrived, because in the end nothing really happens on this trip. The author kinda connects with his father a little bit, then comes home and finds everything pretty much still in the crapper relationship-wise, then fast forwards to an unrelated exchange where he issues an ultimatum to his wife that leads to them getting counseling…the end.

It’s also a very short book…around 200 pages…so I’d have a big problem dropping over 20 bucks for a hardcover edition; if you still want to read it, I’d highly recommend you wait for your library to get it or it to come out in paperback.
Rating: 2 / 5

I really enjoyed my time reading this memoir. The author, Mark Millhone, writes with a light touch and a humorous tone. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and his writing is easy to read. However, somehow this book never seemed to add up, for me anyway, to a complete story.

If you are looking for a book about the love of used cars, this is not the book, and I was glad it wasn’t. The car that figures large on the cover is really a very small part of the book, more sort of an excuse to fit the memoir into a frame. The author and his father drive back to NY after picking up a new used car in Texas. Millhone has been through an awful year. His younger son spent a long time in the NICU after being born, and nearly didn’t make it, his older son was badly bitten in the face by the family dog, and his mother died. Now his wife is in the midst of what seems like a nervous breakdown, and he is not sure how to handle anything. During the trip, flashbacks let us see each of these events, and how his own childhood was quite dysfunctional. Every call to his wife is worse; their marriage seems headed for divorce.

The ending of the book seems rushed, and I don’t get a feeling at all that things were really tied up to my satisfaction. What happened in the end to Boomer the dog? What was the therapy like? How did Benny finally start talking? Many more questions like this hover around my mind.

I don’t mean to say this book is not worth a read, however. I enjoyed most all of my time reading it, and I bet many people would. I just wish it were a little more focused and structured.

One note—there is a lot about dogs here that might upset some animal lovers. I wasn’t overly bothered, but if you are quite sensitive, you might want to avoid this book. I didn’t feel anything that went on wasn’t justified, but not everyone would feel the same way.
Rating: 4 / 5