Book Review: “The Rally” by Carla Vass
When the Car is the Escape — and the Way Back In
Author Carla Vass at her New York City book launch.
The Rally, the debut novel by Carla Vass, is an escapist antidote to a rocky break up.The road trip is the grand escape, the balm, and the force that propels the protagonist Charlie to get out of her rut after suffering a profound betrayal.
The break up in question is not one of the romantic variety, exactly, though self love is very much at the center of this book. Charlie, a twenty-something entrepreneur, poured her soul into her business, a dating app called “Flutter.”
Up to this point, Charlie was a bit of a wunderkind, who had a keen mind for mathematics, a gift for coding algorithms, and solid insight on how to give her dating peers what they wanted. She launched the business with her best friend and co-founder Shane and like many high-flying startups, with great early success, greed intervened as the money and status scaled up. Fuzzy boundaries with Shane blurred Charlie’s judgment, a core part of Charlie’s struggle to reconcile the outcome. At the beginning of the novel, Charlie is caught completely off guard when she is surreptitiously ousted from Flutter by Shane and a group of hostile investors. Vass, a former founder who was also on staff at the early days of Uber, has insight into this particular era of high-stakes, high-growth companies.
“The Rally” by Carla Vass.
Charlie, bruised and betrayed, accepts an invitation from her childhood best friend Lina to an annual European road rally. She arrives totally unprepared for what shapes up to be an over-the-top excess-fueled boondoggle among very wealthy car collectors, where the cars are more of an accessory than the focus. In the middle of wild partying are day drives in classic Ferraris, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsches. To keep things moving along, cars and lovers are swapped amongst the participants at various picturesque destinations along the way.
In the midst of the tomfoolery, cars and characters provide an entertaining reprieve for Charlie whose self confidence is shaken. The final step in the severed Flutter business is to sign all of her rights away for a modest payout, which rankles Charlie and is at the crux of the book’s tension. Will she or won’t she sign her rights away to Shane and the investors?
As they zig zag through French and Italian country and coastal roads, Charlie processes the sting of loss while reading the social cues of the characters around her, in observance of power dynamics. She notices the way women show up as much as men, as she contemplates reinvention. On her first ride, Charlie rides shotgun with Naima, a sage woman of considerable means. “We pull out of the gravel drive, sunlight flashing across chrome. Within seconds, it’s obvious: this woman can drive. She handles the car like it’s an extension of herself – one wrist loose on the wheel, the other flicking through gears with effortless precision. She’s not even showing off. Just… breathing.”
“She handles the car like it’s an extension of herself – one wrist loose on the wheel, the other flicking through gears with effortless precision. She’s not even showing off.”
Charlie begins to consider that maybe there’s more to her identity than a straight line to business success. A love story emerges as Charlie develops a crush on the slightly aloof but beautiful and kind nephew of the rally founder. The tension between the two adds spice. And then there are mishaps of cars in this idyllic dream world including automotive mishaps with co-drivers. “We’re in the heart of Tuscany now, winding through hills blanketed with vineyards, a perfect row of vines stretching endlessly toward the horizon. Olive groves pepper the slopes, and I vaguely recall there’s a reason they’re planted next to the grapevines. I turn to ask Richard about it, but a loud popping sound cuts me off, followed by a hiss of escaping air.”
Like the classic road trip novel, she encounters life lessons along the way. She realizes it's fairly difficult to totally escape your troubles, especially in the interconnected world of dishy startup culture inside a circle of bored wealthy types who make up the investor class. Alas, Charlie learns that one of the rally attendees is an interloper who has partially orchestrated her demise. In sync with his character, he’s a total ass. Eventually all the characters and issues come to a head. Without giving too much away about how it all goes down, like all good revenge novels, Charlie gets hers. “Instead, Naima’s words echo in my head for what feels like the thousandth time. The best revenge is being better.” Yes, it’s time for Charlie to take the wheel again. In The Rally, Vass reminds us that for every dead end, the answer is to find another route.