MONSTER OF A LAND
On the Road in Search of Modern America
by Lauren Hough
A lively, thoughtful memoir of being a stranger in a strange land.
Hough (Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, 2021) cuts quite a figure at the outset: “a six-foot-tall lesbian with a haircut that had grown out a little from ‘lesbian going through some shit,’ but not enough,” wandering into the decidedly unhip confines of Shamrock, Texas, a little burg on the way to Amarillo. The people are nice, regardless of her unwonted appearance, she allows; but, back home in Austin, it’s getting ever harder to live in the old, weird ways the city was known for, now a place where a “murder shack” goes for a million bucks. Buying a van that “looked like it might belong to a retiree or a meth cook,” Hough hits the road in an approximation of the route John Steinbeck followed in Travels With Charley (1962), complete with a dog of her own named Woody Guthrie. Helpful Texas friends offered her guns for the trip, which she declines, though there are a few fraught moments awaiting her. More common are the simple puzzles of our time: why it should be, for instance, that Confederate flags should be flying in New Hampshire and at Plymouth Rock. Hough is cheerfully obscene: Describing the giant box-store-cum-gas-station that is Buc-ee’s, a staple of the South, she pegs it as “what might happen if a 7-Eleven fucked a Cracker Barrel.” But more, she is an astute observer, commiserating with the forgotten and left-behind people of the Ozarks and the Appalachians, their psychic wounds salved with opioids, and with the fieldworkers of Washington, paid barely enough to live and hounded by ICE. Concludes Hough, “I’m just one person who took a road trip with my dog. If I’ve got anything to say, it’s only this—I’m tired of blaming those with no power for all that’s gone wrong with our world.”
A politically charged meander down highways and byways, and just right for our time.