Sadly, I didn’t really enjoy Hit and Run by John Freeman probably because from the beginning the plot seemed all over the place. I suspect the author might have intended this approach to reflect the state of mind of our narrator John Frederick, the main character, but it felt to me this scatter-gun approach to telling the story lacked focus.

Freeman employs a stream of consciousness literary style in which the narrator’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. The novella comprises one long, uninterrupted narrative without chapter breaks.

The difficulty for me with this approach is it left me unsure whether Freeman knew what story he wanted to tell, or the sort of story it was to be. Things became somewhat clearer, and the pace picked up, but not without becoming overly-complex at the same time. 

Hit and Run is categorized as noir, but it skews more towards experimental literature. Yes, it begins with a crime, a fatal hit-and-run traffic accident, but it isn’t a crime novella. It seemed the criminal act and the inefficiency of the criminal justice system that came after, was only meant as a type of metaphorical parallel for the circumstances John Frederick faced later–losing his mother to a wasting disease, the dissolution of his marriage to his wife Linda, and his relationship with Farah towards the end of the book. 

John wasn’t unlikable, but I didn’t really engage with him. Characterization was thin, even for a work of novella length, and given the lack of much dialogue, the characters simply aren’t terribly relatable.

As I thought about the book after finishing it, I wondered if Freeman meant it more as a sort of allegory whose sole purpose is to represent abstract concepts or ideas rather than a story aimed at entertaining a reader expecting a story about a hit-and-run traffic accident investigation. If so, perhaps the book was simply too deep for me to understand what the author was diving at. Regardless, ultimately, the story never came together for me. It all seemed just too chaotic and the story just never seemed to coincide with the blurb once we were beyond the violent act witnessed by our narrator and his friends at the beginning from which the book draws its title. 

I think the bones of the story have potential with more work, but as is the presentation of it just didn’t work for me. It was a quick read, and I never felt bored with it, but I think that was mostly because I thought the story would eventually come around to the story the blurb implies. But it never really doe in the expected way.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.