Book Review

The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson
( New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997.)

The Things We Do For Love

Well conceived and beautifully written, The Perfect Vehicle begins and ends at the intersection where survival meets aesthetics.  Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes sensuously and psychologically about the enigma of her passion for her Motto Guzzi motorcycle.  She asks herself why and how she is drawn to ride while investigating the mount’s culture and her relationship to her Italia n seducer.

The book weaves together her personal odyssey, including a challenging onset of panic disorder soon after buying the bike, with the history of motorcycle riding and racing, focusing on the Italian bike that is the object of her ardor.  In a uniquely honest and self-conscious attempt to
explain her attraction to riding, she touches on the psychology of reaction formations.  In this case, her desire to ride is understood as a defense and a solution against the very fear of death, which is concentrated in riding.

By beginning to explore this touchy subject, she reveals much about herself, while contributing to the emerging research into the meaning and motive of some of our riskier avocations.  Her focus on fear and the dangers associated with motorcycle riding has evoked disdain i n some corners of the motorcycling community.  Any rider reading these sections of the book will have heard like stories and may have a few to tell themselves.  Yet, it is
still startling and sobering to dissect the passionate endeavor of recreational and professional riding and look at it in the clinical light that is provided by safety statistics and fact.  Fortunately, her writing is so fluidly descriptive that the fear evoked for the reading-rider is simultaneously digested by the pleasure she conveys about her riding adventures.

The author’s attempt to explain her admittedly erotic attraction to riding, while struggling with her particular anxieties, is interesting and undoubtedly true for other less thoughtful and self-conscious riders.  She writes, “always the spiral of terror has its origins in the
self’s terrible demand that it must control that which cannot be controlled: every minute of one’s fate” (227).  While ending in the same philosophical paradox that is the moniker of many high risk endeavors--that life is experienced more fully when the real possibility of death excites the animal to its maximal performance and feeling--the chronicle of her motorcycle journey discloses something more.

Learning to ride, followed by the “beginning rider stage” of a motorcyclist’s life, concentrates most personal fears and free floating anxieties in the single point that is the machine, along with the variations of becoming its accomplice.  The motorcycle essentially concretizes all of one’s fear of mortality in one place and in one endeavor. If the rider is not awed by the possibilities, the significant others in their life will be sure to interject, while inviting friends and family to comment on the dangers of the vehicle, throwing in a few third-hand horror stories to boot.  There is no end to the projection the machine engenders for riders and non-riders alike.

The personal projections the author brings to riding and learning to wrench her machine are examined ably.  As she learns to care for and repair her Motto Guzzi, she identifies a growing ability to care for herself along with an increased sense of independence.  Collective and archetypal projections are hinted at but find little discussion in the book.

What Ms. Pierson does brilliantly is describe the riding phenomenon i n sinuous and sensuous prose, enlivening the experience for the reader. Consider this passage: “Moreover, it was a pleasure in which the rider made flagrant use of animal skill, got dirty and sweaty, and enjoyed it all so much he or she did not care who saw the smile of abandon. This might be one thing behind closed doors, but quite another in the public streets” (70). Tucked within her descriptive writing is a wily description of progressive stages of embodiment, facilitated by learning to ride and riding.

In reading her chronicle I imagined the author confronting her fears and then gradually moving through them, as the animal body took over and became aware of, comfortable with, and proactive in addressing actual threats to the physical self.  In essence, her psychic fears are confronted and normalized in the face of real physical threats.  Riding is a risk, which
demands a balanced integration of mind and body.  Her book illustrates, once again, that the love of riding and motorcycles is about the heart and body rather than the mind.  Motorcycle riding is illogical: it is precisely the need to transcend rational-linear confinement that is part of its draw.

It is this simultaneously transcendent and embodying function of motorcycle riding which causes the author to comment, “Riding is an occupation defined by duplicities” (9).  How acceptance and progressive metabolization of psychic terror, in the face of physical peril, is healing and becomes pleasurable is one of the mysteries and the magic of the motorcycle meeting its perfect rider.

Melissa Pierson is the perfect rider and a remarkable writer.  She has eloquently described her internal journey while documenting her external one.  She progresses from dependent female to independent rider, by dealing with the road, the motorcycle and her motorcycling cohorts.  By facing her desire to be taken care of and her ambivalence to be that caregiver, she documents a personal and archetypal pilgrimage.  Her story is not every rider’s story, but her journey is one of a seeker who has become more fully herself through the motorcycle experience.  The Perfect Vehicle is a privilege and pleasure to read for riders and non-riders alike.

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