Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma Kola

Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum & Karma Kola:
a manual of etiquette for ladies crossing Canada by train / Paulette Jiles
Polestar, c1986.
 105 p.

This quirky little classic was a treat. It's one of Jiles' early works of fiction, and it's really a melding of fiction and a  more prose poem structure. It's made up of very short 'chapters', some just half a page. There is a lot of wordplay and bright imagery. 

It begins with an American woman fleeing her maxed out credit cards and debts by boarding the cross Canada train in Vancouver, heading for Montreal, and doing so in the spirit of all the film noir Femme Fatales. A new name, an assumed profession, and she's off. On the train she meets a handsome man - but is he interested in her or is he a detective chasing her down? 

The story is basically shaped by the progress of the train. They are in closed quarters, there is only one place they are going to. The two of them move from their cabins to the club car, where there are also Americans and a dead body (trickery!), and backward and forward in their life stories. 

The ending is also rather charmingly self-referential, and the whole book moves as quickly as a train along the tracks. Recommend to read this all in one go. 

The joy of the book is in its style and structure, really. Here is one example, one of my favourite descriptive bits, to give you a taste. 

The train charges down the tracks into the blackening happy night, down the typeface of the double rails and ties, as if it were a typewriter carriage engaged upon an endless sentence -- all of it in upper case, all of it in Helvetica Bold 48-point -- typing out, like a transcontinental court reporter, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

As a type of road trip novel, and one that highlights the progression across points in Canada, this is a great pick. I enjoyed it very much.