The Company Car has been recently published by Random House. Click here to order this book online.

What They're Saying About The Company Car:

Ten pages into The Company Car you know you're in the hands of a masterful storyteller. C.J. Hribal's characters are as real as anyone we know in "real life," and their story is the story of America on the brink of monumental change. The canvas is broad, the sights and sounds true, the vision both hilarious and heartbreaking.

-Richard Russo, author of Nobody's Fool, The Risk Pool, and Straight Man

"...for the reader of Hribal's raucous revisiting of family life in the last half of the last century, [The Company Car] is a trip that is as exhilarating as a ride on the most convoluted roller coaster. Vividly atmospheric, irresistibly winsome, Hribal's loving paean to the American dream is as comforting and familiar as the classic fifties-era sitcoms it richly evokes."

--Booklist, starred review

"The Company Car is a wonderful novel. I lost track of the number of times I laughed out loud. C.J. Hribal writes with grace and unerring wit in this celebration of the American family."

--Robert Boswell, author of Century's Son

"The Company Car illuminates through one microscopically detailed family portrait the history of a whole era in the heartland. This is a strong, whole-hearted, and often very funny novel."

--Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever


My latest book is a novel, The Company Car, which clocks in at about 750 pages. No question it's a big book. I intended it as such. It's an epic for little people, fifty years of American social history told (comically and tragically) through the history of one family-in fact, through the collective eyes of seven kids looking at their parents' marriage and at their own lives. The novel opens with the parents getting married on television in 1952, and ends with strange doings on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. And in between the father wants to realize his big dreams, and protect his children from all that change, and he really can't do either.

Susan Faludi's recent non-fiction book Stiffed deals with the idea that men of the last half-century have been buffeted by tremendous societal changes, and have gotten "stiffed" as a result. The Company Car straps that notion into the seat of a roller coaster and sends it on a fifty-year ride. Tom Wolfe likes to look at social history from the point of view of the movers and shakers. The Company Car looks at it from the point of view of the small potatoes. American culture's cannon fodder. This is meant to be a novel for the rest of us-the folks who won't find themselves in the pages of People or Talk, who won't have their fifteen minutes of fame, who just want to carve out a little contentment for themselves, and through circumstance and their own blunderings manage to have things blow up in their face. They also almost, sorta, kinda get there. So it's a novel of America, a novel for the rest of us. It's a novel about how we got from there to here, and whatever happened to us?