How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Is An Essential Manual for the Romanticist In Everyone
Remember that old red pickup truck you had when you were in high school? The one with the bench seat that was so narrow the middle seater had to straddle the stick shift while you awkwardly rested your arm on their leg when shifting gears? You loved that car, even kept it filled with gas and fresh washing fluid sometimes. Then one afternoon when you were rolling over the last speedbump in the afterschool exodus line the engine fell out, splintered on the cement. You sat for a few moments behind the wheel while the impatient honked behind you, remembering the time you sat in the drive-in theater and kissed that girl until the movie’s soundtrack turned to static. You haven’t seen it in years, but now here it is and damn did you love that automobile.
Christopher Boucher knows how you feel; he’s been there with his ’71 Volkswagen too, broken down in the middle of 91 just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. His bleeding manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive instructs on more than how to find the beating engineheart of your VW: it also teaches about the anger, regret, and love that motivate us after the death of a parent.
Written with brilliant wit and a sensitive touch, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alivemimics the style of John Muir’s 1969 manual of nearly the same name, slipping in and out of surrealist car maintenance passages while telling the story of Boucher’s son, his ’71 VW, as they both process the death of Boucher’s father at the hands of the Heart Attack Tree.
I know it sounds like a bizarre premise (it is) and it can be confusing when Boucher guts the definition of words, but the story, and new words, are injected with a glowing, wistful emotion that turn piñatas into evenings filled with small moments of time and girlfriends into women made of stained glass that shatter if they get too cold and are impossible to resist.
Simply, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an essential manual for the romanticist in everyone.