Driving, she said, makes her nervous. “I just assume that every other car on the road, the person is crazy, and drunk, and has a gun,” she said, easing into traffic on the Bowery. The Checker prompted a few appreciative honks. “It’s not impossible that if you’re in the car with me for 15 minutes, someone is going to offer to buy it,” she said to a reporter, who had tagged along. “A man offered to trade me a new Mercedes for it in my last garage.”

Ms. Lebowitz bought her Checker, a pale gray 1979 Marathon, for $9,000 in 1978 with the better part of a book advance. “This was the first thing I bought, which shows how impractical I am,” she said, tossing a cigarette onto West Houston Street. “Everyone tried to dissuade me from buying it.”

She wanted a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce, which she could not afford. This was the most desirable alternative: “They also made a limousine, which was $1,000 more, and which I had to be talked out of buying, because there’s no car too big, too flashy, for Fran.”

The appeal was purely visual, she said. “It has a kind of, like, ‘car’ look, like a child’s cartoon of a car,” she said, taking a gingerly turn onto Bleecker Street. “I knew Roy Lichtenstein — you know, the painter? — and he loved these cars, because he thought it was like such a cartoon-looking car. Once I pulled up somewhere where he was, and he said, ‘You expect a family of ducks to come out of the back of this car.’ It has a very graphic silhouette.”

“The new one has nothing to do with why people like Checkers,” she added. “The reason people like Checkers is not only because they are very roomy, etc., but because Checkers have flair. O.K.? Flair has nothing to do with technology. It’s a visual thing.”