A dozen years ago, a German student calculated that Sal Paradise, protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), traveled 17,000 miles crisscrossing the continent. Anyone wanting to recreate that odyssey today, with soaring gas prices, would be out thousands of dollars—far more than any penniless Beat adventurer could afford. Thankfully, this summer, there are plenty of other (more affordable) opportunities for one to partake in that quintessentially American summer tradition, the road trip, by living vicariously through others’ journeys—on the page.
Let’s hit the road first with Isaac Fitzgerald’s American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed (Knopf, May 12). The author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts (2022) retraces the steps of folk hero Johnny Appleseed, walking (and driving a used Jeep) from the Bay State to Indiana. The trek, writes our critic in a starred review, “gives him the vantage point of seeing small-town America up close. And although that America is sad and frayed, it’s also full of interesting and well-meaning people who speak to ‘human civility.’…What Fitzgerald learns about himself and the state of the nation is more compelling still, with all their triumphs and tragedies.”
Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski take to the road in Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love (Dutton, May 19). The book, says our review, is “a gonzo spin around the world to search for the meaning of it all.” Schur and Posnanski “hang out with some drunk people at the World Darts Championship,” spend time at a pickleball tournament in Kansas City, and take in the wonders of 7-foot-4-inch Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs.
In Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America (Pantheon, June 16), Lauren Hough, author of the essay collection Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing (2021), packs her 2001 Dodge van and leaves Austin, Texas, with her Husky mix Woody. “The plan, if you could call it that,” she writes, was to trace John Steinbeck’s route in Travels With Charley (1962). As open-minded as Steinbeck—but funnier—she picks up a hitchhiker one day: “I said, ‘I don’t know where I’m headed, brother.’ I shit you not, he said, ‘Far out.’ Then he hopped up into the passenger seat.”
And there are, of course, overseas explorations. Antonio Romani, once a teacher and bookseller, moved with his wife, novelist Martha Cooley, from Brooklyn to a Tuscan town. Originally published in Italian, The Patient Wait of the Stones: Time and Memory in Lunigiana (Galpón Press, June 2) is a thoughtful meditation on what it’s like to establish roots elsewhere. “When I try to follow the conversation of villagers talking in their dialect, they chuckle if I don’t understand,” he writes. “In this way, they affirm my non-belonging, even though I’ve chosen to live here year-round.…I accept this (realizing they don’t mean to hurt me): They feel that I’m a stranger who must go through my own purgatory if I wish their world to become mine, too.” Our starred review praises this “charming memoir of life in a tiny Italian town that hasn’t been overrun by tourists—yet.”
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
