Amid the archeology of literature, there are novels easily found, gauzed only by a light crumble of soil, and there are true artifacts: buried six feet under. Their chance encounter is particularly worth talking about because one has to wonder how in the history of the civilized world this pairing of ink and paper has not continued its glory, glory, hallelujah.
In the 1970s and '80s, Helen Potrebenko was a cherished and important Vancouver writer, well known for her early writing in Pedestal, Canada's first women's-liberation newspaper, and for her numerous books that included short stories, novels, poems and plays. Hers was the significant working-class urban feminist voice. She also had jokes, good ones. Modern Times, a major bookstore in San Francisco, had a big sign telling customers that if they only read one book in 1975, it should be Taxi!.
New Star Books published Taxi! during a time when “political” was an urgent rather than a dismissed word. (The novel is now available from Lazara Press.) According to Potrebenko, “Women here were very concerned that there should be literature with which we could identify, and since most women are working class and find very little about people like us to read, we were going to rectify that.”
Taxi! rectifies a great deal more than that and enjoys a born-again pertinence today. It's wonderfully refreshing and confrontational 34 years later, as we are humped by the recession. On Page 11, the ring from the line “Capitalism has begun its cataclysmic degeneration” would make Karl Marx sit up in his grave and nod, in unison, with the rest of us bamboozled by recent banking bollockology.
Helen Potrebenko today, at her home in Burnaby, B.C.
Shannon, a sharp and mordantly funny cab driver, delivers as many apt nuggets as passengers while she navigates, examines and confronts the city, clinging to her sanity, among the inane blather of those tripping into, out of and around her cab.
It is this perfect combination of the cab crisscrossing, taking the reader into distinctive Vancouver neighbourhoods, and the varied population who open and slam the door that situates the reader in place and time.
It's a novel to read for then and now: Potrebenko's unique voice and perfectly paced writing render it in witty exchanges and jazzy Chekhovian musings, such as: “She was sometimes a personable person. Sometimes people called her beautiful and sometimes ugly, which goes to show she isn't a proper woman since with proper women there is no doubt whether they are beautiful or ugly.”
And: “Shannon fell in love with Ronnie in October but preoccupied as are all drivers with making money, he didn't notice until several weeks had gone by.”
Or: “She would have preferred a woman friend but she hardly ever met any women. Few cab drivers are women and few women earn enough money to ride in cabs much.”
Or: “Sundays are always slow unless it snows and it rarely snows in August in Vancouver.”
The fragmented style of the novel conveys the fragmented nature of the job. Discombobulating images flitter though Shannon's wing and rear-view mirrors, and the snips and snipes of conversation, or more accurately interrogation, gate-crash her ears. I've got no money. Airport. Do you ball? Are you married? How do you like cab driving? What sort of job is this? Where can I buy a woman?
Unusually for a character in a novel, but like many people currently, she is looking for a job. We learn of the extrapolations of scoring shifts as a cab driver, and the specific extrapolation for a female driver. Encore, Do you ball?
