YOUR DRIVER IS WAITING

A gender-swapped retelling of Taxi Driver.

Damani works long hours driving for a ride-share app in an unnamed city. She lives with her mother, who has been left so deeply depressed by her husband’s sudden death that she rarely leaves the couch. This debut novel is a retelling, of sorts, of Martin Scorsese’s classic film Taxi Driver. On a superficial level, Damani does resemble Scorsese’s Travis Bickle. She drives; she doesn’t sleep; she lifts weights. Unlike Bickle, though, who is profoundly alienated from everything and everyone he encounters, Damani has a circle of friends and an attachment to a kind of utopian, socialist community known as the Doo Wop. Bickle’s alienation has given way to Damani’s sense of solidarity. She is a queer woman of color, and her city has erupted into a series of protests aimed at everything from climate change to wealth disparities and police brutality. Near the end, a protester runs past Damani, shouting, “Abolish the military! Stop killing Muslims! Black lives matter!” The real trouble starts when Damani falls for a wealthy White woman named Jolene, as oblivious in her privilege as Damani is trapped in debt. Jolene fancies herself an activist, but her activism is lukewarm, and her parents pay for her lifestyle. A political argument between Jolene and Damani’s friends becomes excruciatingly awkward. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what Guns’ intention is, either in this conversation or the book as a whole: While she seems to have meant the novel as a satire, the humor falls flat. The characters speak as though they are mouthpieces for someone else’s point of view. Neither Damani nor anyone else ever emerges as a fully fledged character. As a whole, the novel feels confused: vaguely dystopian, blurrily political, and not especially original.

Despite its ambitious premise, this debut novel never comes to life.