We found Minnesota writer Leif Enger last Saturday afternoon browsing the Southern literature shelves. He held a copy of Charles Portis' Norwood in his hand. Leif was at Turnrow to sign and read from his new novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, which tells the story of a writer and a former train robber who wander the backroads of the new Old West, in transition from a lawless frontier to a modern promise land. It's generous humor struck as reminiscent of Portis even before we found Leif with the evidence in his hand. "I must have been overdosing on True Grit before I started writing it," he said when asked about Portis' influence.
We agreed that True Grit, perhaps Portis' most famous book, is a neglected classic, often overshadowed by the popular movie adaptation starring John Wayne. It's also one of his best books, possessing the rare comic tone that makes fans of the former Little Rock newspaperman so devoted. Like a handful of other terrific, unsung heroes of American letters, Portis has inspired a small legion of knowing writers and book lovers who acknowledge each other with quiet reverence like fellow members of a secret brotherhood. (For initiation, read an excerpt from True Grit, or pick up the new 40th anniversary edition, with an afterword by Greenwood-born Donna Tartt, here.)
Comparing True Grit and Leif's book — "a post-Western," he described it, where the characters wander through the rugged West seeking redemption instead of blood and justice — brought up the topic of road novels. What better to read in summer? The great Oxford writer Barry Hannah (another of the cult-inspiring unsung heroes of American letters mentioned above) used to tell us, summarizing the classic plot devices, "There are only two stories: let's take a trip and stranger comes to town."
You can guess Leif's choice for favorite road novel, but it got us to thinking about our own favorites.
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis comes up most often around the staff. That and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, and On the Road by Kerouac, perhaps the quintessential American road novel. But The Dog of the South is a novel ever in need of a champion. It has languished out of print for odd stretches since its publication in 1979 but is currently published, along with Portis' other novels, by the Overlook Press. It's the story of Ray Midge, a mild-mannered newspaperman and amateur Civil War expert whose wife runs off to Central America with one of his colleagues. Ray gives chase, picking up a stranded motorist along the way, the cranky Dr. Symes. Their mismatched companionship, as well as Ray's wry commentary, provides genuine and bountiful humor.
Another little-known favorite is The Asiatics by Frederic Prokosch, a seemingly simple story of a young man's passage from Beirut to China, largely on foot or catching rides across the many diverse countries of Asia. There have been few books that better capture the rhythm of travel and the strange unexpectedness of the long road. The lolling pace and realistic exchanges between the narrator and the many locals he crosses make this the ideal novel to tuck into a backpack for anyone embarking on a winding, uncharted quest to exotic lands.
We'd recommend too Tim Winton's The Riders, a scary, breathless and wonderfully infuriating novel about a man who arrives at the airport to fetch his wife and young daughter. When the young girl emerges alone and speechless, the husband embarks on a frantic search across Europe for his missing wife.
We posed this question of road novels to Thomas H. Cook, who was in the store last week to sign and read from his new novel, Master of the Delta, and we found it interesting that he too mentioned The Riders. He also cast a vote for Independence Day by Richard Ford, in which Ford's Frank Bascombe takes to the road to reconnect with his teenage son, moving from one troubled and hilarious interaction to the next. (Incidentally, when Ford visited to sign and read from the third Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land, he told us that he finished Independence Day during an extended stay in Greenwood.)
Intrigued by what other road novels we might discover, we polled several other writers and book folks, each of whom came up with surprising choices. For instance Rick Bragg, the great Southern memoirist, declared Stephen King's post-apocalyptic The Stand one of his favorite road novels, followed by Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk, where the road is an Old West trail. He mentioned too Carry My Bones, the debut novel by J. Wes Yoder, in which three men slip through the back alleys of Alabama in the wake of a botched crime. "Physically, they don't travel very far," Bragg said, "but emotionally, they cover a lot of ground." Reminding us that it's the quest more than the trip that matters in road novels.
In that vein, Ashley Warlick, a gifted novelist from South Carolina, chose another overlooked classic, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, a love story set on a driving tour of the French backcountry. "It's very much a book about longing and desire," Ashley said, "due in no small way to the fact that Dean and Anne-Marie are always driving, eating or in bed. So if you think about our fantasy lives as you think about our regular lives, it's like the road is one third of what we fantasize about. Like how we spend one third of our day asleep." Amen.
Jonathan Miles is on the road himself right now in the middle of a long book tour for his hot new novel, Dear American Airlines, a kind of anti-road novel in which the main character seeks nothing more than to be on the road but is instead stranded in an airport. Miles chose The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey, saying, "I'll warm
up to any novel that kicks off with a dude shooting his fridge with a .357 and
then hitting the highway with his dying dog at his side. But this is Ed Abbey,
which means you get a whole lot more than disgruntled gunplay, road tales, and a
bawl-inducing dog story: You get a big hot blast of philosophy, cranky humor,
grumpy wisdom, and tender observance of the natural world (humanity included).
I've reread this book so many times that it's fallen apart on me."
Alane Salierno Mason, an editor at W.W. Norton who works with Andre Dubus III and Mississippian Brad Watson, chose Elio Vittorino's Conversations in Sicily; particularly, she says with a grin, the translation she did for New Directions Publishing. "It is a train novel more than a road novel per se, but it is a physical, emotional, and moral journey all wrapped into one, narrated in language both very lyrical and very down to earth, populated by larger than life characters that are also completely recognizable and real. I totally fell in love with it, which is why I put months into re-translating it."
Finally we caught up with George Singleton, author of Work Shirts for Madmen among many other hilarious story collections. He was on the road himself, in Las Vegas, where'd he just gotten his first tattoo and won several hundred dollars on a penny slot machine. Naturally, he was thinking about Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a tricky pick in that it's not technically a novel, yet a veritable American classic of road reportage with fictional elements. (We still don't understand why James Frey didn't use Thompson's precedent to defend himself on Oprah.) George also mentioned Don Quixote, which may be the first road novel ever written, and certainly one of the funniest.
But the road novel that first came to mind for George, without any prompting ... Norwood by Charles Portis, who may be, it now seems clear, the book lover's choice for king of the road novel.
We'd love to hear about any other overlooked road novels. We'll keep you posted....
