Let the Dog Drive A Novel Author:David Bowman Bud Salem, the 18-year-old narrator, flees California and his mother, a flaky televangelist. Hitchhiking in the Mojave Desert in 1975, he teams up with Sylvia Cushman, a "literate housewife" who perceives secret geometric patterns in Emily Dickinson's verse. Bud makes a pilgrimage to Dickinson's house in Amherst, Mass., and then goes on to Detro... more »it, where he meets Sylvia's husband, Joshua, an auto engineer who tests cars for safety by having dogs drive the vehicles in bloody, fatal accidents. A wealthy Iranian debutante hiding from death squads, photographs of dogs' souls taken by Bud's father (an ex-stuntman in Tarzan films) and a shootout with a lunatic cowboy in Brooklyn's Coney Island aquarium are elements of a plot that careens from New York to New Orleans to Texas.« less