The Art of Racing in the Rain: AKA a story about a selfish father who puts his race car hobby above his entire family for 200+ pages

I’m over a decade late to reading this one, but I wasn’t missing out on much. Why is this book narrated by a dog? Because if it was narrated by anyone else, it would be painfully clear that this story is about a protagonist who’s actually just a selfish father with reckless spending habits who prioritizes nothing except his race car training.

I have nothing against a dog narrating a story, but if you’re gonna go that route…the story itself better be pretty believable. Except this story wasn’t, at all. Frankly it felt like an insult to all the male authors that have managed to write about marriage, children, and women in a meaningful way.

Denny is probably the most unlikeable character I’ve ever read, yet all of his unlikeable qualities are written in a way that implies he can do no wrong. He misses the birth of his first child (with the permission of his wife, because she only serves as a passive extension of Denny), he’s reckless with his family’s money, he lies to his wife about their finances, he takes out a second mortgage to fund his race car hobby, and he willingly misses out on months of his daughter’s life to go train for racing while his wife is sick at home. It’s all about living in the present moment, duh! But somehow he’s also SHOCKED that anyone could suggest his daughter would be better off with financially stable and present caregivers who aren’t jetting off for months at a time to indulge in their hobby.

And then there’s Annika… the young, 15 year old temptress who, of course, has massive tits (this had to be mentioned multiple times) and is somehow incredibly attracted to a grieving middle-aged man that just lost his wife. Denny is conveniently faultless and asleep throughout the whole ordeal. Even after her accusations that nearly ruined his life, he waltzes right up to her in public and comes from a place of (fake) understanding rather than pressing charges that she absolutely would have deserved. I don’t think the author has ever put much thought into how false accusations actually work, or how rare a false rape accusation actually is, but this is the same author that makes zero mention of the protagonist grieving his wife once she’s dead, so maybe my bar is set too high.

The story conveniently wraps up with everything getting fixed in the last few pages by characters that made zero appearance till that point. Denny’s mysterious parents were fine with disowning him for years, but are also happy to finally meet their granddaughter (that they chose not to meet??) and give their son a huge sum of money to make up for their absence. Denny is conveniently offered a lucrative job and apartment in Italy, so obviously he uproots his daughter’s entire life to go chase his race car dreams. Never mind the fact that she’s probably grieving her dead mother (we can’t know for sure, because it doesn’t ever get mentioned), doesn’t know a single person, and doesn’t speak the local language. He was willing to miss her birth, so obviously he’s willing to uproot her life at one of its most traumatic points, purely for his own selfish reasons.

Every chapter is either a race car metaphor, or another terrible thing happening to Denny. The grandparents were so evil and Denny was so faultless it was almost comical. He provides zero emotional support to his child, he ultimately isolates her from everything she’s ever known, and he’s happy to move onto his new life in Italy now that his wife is dead and her parents aren’t on his ass anymore. For a book that attempts to have such a meaningful message about life, the protagonist was really a shitty guy. And don’t get me started on the fact that he puts his beloved dog in a race car to be restrained while going 100+ miles an hour.

But anyways. I hope this author doesn’t actually have a wife or kids.