Never underestimate the American obsession with "the road". In a society which believes in the notion of personal reinvention - which embraces both the secular and religious idea of being "born-again" - the road has always been the principle conduit down which Americans travel whenever they seek to change their lives.
Of course, the entire notion of "the road" has long changed since Kerouac wrote that infamous (and, for my money, largely unreadable) paean to the tarmacadam arteries which weave their way across the American continent. To begin with, the old two-lane blacktops of pre-war yore have now become overshadowed by the world's largest system of interstate highways - perhaps the nation's greatest domestic building project, which began during the post-1945 economic boom, and accelerated amid all the paranoia associated with the Cold War. (The then president, Dwight Eisenhower, saw the interstates as an effective way to move troops and large segments of the population in the event of a Communist attack). Nowadays, of course, the interstates are inextricably bound up with the altered nature of the American socio-economic landscape - and the fact that the shopping mall, the gasoline alley, and the suburban subdivision so defines the national topography. For this reason, driving the interstate these days often feels like being flushed down a long monocultural tube.
Still, there is something mesmeric about shooting down these ribbons of concrete, so vast and seemingly endless that they encourage you to "put the pedal to the metal" and cruise. Larry McMurtry - the much acclaimed author of such intelligent popular fiction as Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Horseman, Pass By (to name but three volumes from his protean career) - is also an inveterate road junkie. As he admits at the outset of his engagingly shaggy account of driving his nation's highways: "From earliest boyhood the American road has been part of my life - central to it". And though he sets out on his assorted interstate journeys to prove that - despite the McDonalds and Taco Bell clustered around every highway exit - American roads really don't look the same, McMurtry's quirky, self-reflective narrative is more bound up in his internal mental topography than that of the terrain he is passing through. Indeed, this is a travel book which thankfully doesn't attempt to sing an anthem to America's highways and byways. Nor does it try to paint a palsy-walsy portrait of lovable down home folk in rustic diners and spit-on-the-floor saloons. On the contrary, McMurtry doesn't record one conversation in his ruminative chronicle. Rather, his commentary centres on his passion for books - for, besides being a popular novelist of hefty commercial and critical credentials, he is also one of America's foremost bibliophiles; a major antiquarian book dealer who (by his own account) has read more than 3,000 travel books, and for whom every stretch of road has dense literary connections.
Consider, for example, his sojourn to Northern Michigan - a trip which not only sparks off a riff about Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, but also the work of Janet Lewis, a friend of Hemingway, whose now forgotten novel, The Invasion, is a small classic of life in this northern domain. As always, McMurtry writes wonderfully on writers writing about landscape: "The rich shadings and long cadences she [Lewis] uses to describe the forests in their various seasons bring to mind the thick prose Faulkner uses to describe the big woods of Mississippi. I wouldn't push that comparison too far, though I do think landscape partially determines the prose writers use to describe it; dense forests seem to prompt writers to a corresponding density of expression."
Roads is brimming with American literary trivia - yet McMurtry never crams his erudition down your throat. Instead, he gently dazzles you with the depth of his reading and his ability to find an authorial anecdote at every turn of the highway. Of course, along the way, we also learn more than a thing or two about his decades in the used book business, about his dealings with Hollywood, about fragments of his Texas childhood and the fact that he was named after a relative who fell from a grain elevator, and assorted other remembrances of things past.
Those who really want an account of driving the American interstates should steer clear of Roads - because when it comes to an imaginative description of a region, the book could be kindly described as prosaic ("It is not necessary to travel around the populous south shores of any of the Great Lakes to feel oneself in the land of Big Industry"). But the guy knows how to tell a great literary anecdote . . . and he really does know a thing or two about books.
Douglas Kennedy's new novel, The Pursuit of Happiness, will be published by Hutchinson in May 2001.