ROADS: Driving America’s Great Highways
By Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster, 206 pages, $25
In 1991, Larry McMurtry informs us, he died. More accurately, he underwent serious heart surgery, and the scars from being “radically cut open,” emotional and physical, have caused him to go in search of some sort of restoration. Near the end of his latest book, “Roads,” he writes: “For the past eight years I’ve been struggling to collect and reassemble these drifting fragments of personality and I believe I have now reassembled most of them.”
By this point, however, the reader of “Roads” has for some time understood that the meandering text, as full of personal rumination as of travel observation, is not really about “crisscrossing America,” as the publisher’s blurb indicates.
“Roads,” like many of the travelogues and travel-based narratives McMurtry references, is more about the possibility of reconstituting one’s past, of suturing together the torn, disparate pieces of one’s self in a time and place that McMurtry keeps pointing out is characterized best by speed, impatience and fragmentation. Like the oft-mentioned Jack Kerouac, McMurtry is not concerned with practical things, with an ultimate arrival, with finding “it,” as Kerouac would have put it. Like Marcel Proust, the other often-cited literary figure of “Roads,” McMurtry is invested in remembrance. McMurtry uses his travels–undertaken over a period of months in which he flew to various cities across the U.S., rented a car and drove across famous and personally meaningful highways–as a way to achieve a degree of solitude that is practically taboo in a contemporary, media-ruled America in which all space, personal or public, is mediated in one way or another.
McMurtry’s prose at times reaches a level of elegance and wistfulness that makes the heart ache. Thematically, the story is equal parts Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Twain’s “Roughing It.” Throughout “Roads,” McMurtry achieves a remarkable, almost paradoxical effect: He makes us feel that we are along for the ride even while making us wish we were actually there, thinking his thoughts, reading our own pasts through the dazzling landscape he peruses. Thus McMurtry achieves a sublime mingling of presence and absence seen in some of the best of American travelogues: “Roughing It,” John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charlie,” Kerouac’s “On the Road” and “Lonesome Traveler,” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Mid-Fifties Journals.”
In so doing, McMurtry tries to give voice to the inarticulate pining that contemporary Americans have for returning to a time of national and personal wholeness and simplicity. McMurtry seems here to be most deeply concerned with understanding the impasse in contemporary, postmodern culture in apprehending what is “true” and “real” that too often results in missing what is important. McMurtry’s search on America’s highways is calculated to escape substituting such noble pursuits for the materialistic, mundane, sensual adventurism consumer society has packaged and sold as the answer for spiritual bankruptcy.
It is the American dilemma that so obsessed F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby”: the ever-defeating, already-doomed striving to somehow grasp the golden ring, the green light on which the American mythos is predicated.
More generically, McMurtry’s multiple drives vividly demonstrate the never-ceasing need to perambulate and circumnavigate that best captures the American essence. Yet, what McMurtry’s book does best is to make clear that all roads lead back to the self. The roads we take ultimately define us. Our pursuits, our searches, will yield a result, substantive or not, fulfilling or not. McMurtry suggests that we cannot (nor should we) escape the past or present. The final three chapters of “Roads” are a revelation. Brilliant in what they evoke about the self, its connection to personal meaning, place, home and nation, they make indispensable reading. Although not entirely convinced by McMurtry’s claim by book’s end that “I have finally been to where the road goes, and shouldn’t need to go looking for a while,” we are convinced by the example of his vibrant, alluring introspection that we should undertake to perform our own ruminative journeys.
Should the idea of combing through someone’s wandering recollections seem uninteresting, be prepared to encounter some entertaining and educational passages as McMurtry makes his way across America. “Roads” is a travel narrative of the first order. He is a virtual encyclopedia of western lore, Native American history, regional anecdotes and literary minutiae that he weaves together in an extraordinary American pastiche. McMurtry is a dream-guide, not only signaling points of interest, but also providing such compelling contexts that America’s geography comes to life. It will leave you wondering where your road atlas is hiding. Since most of McMurtry’s drives are along major highways and by-ways, they will be familiar to readers with even modest road-trip backgrounds. As McMurtry drives through various states and regions, he is not shy about leveling his critiques and opinions of state politics, regional mores, and local mannerisms. California is exciting, but maddening. Texas, the place closest to McMurtry’s heart, is too big, violent, but full of tough, courageous folk. The Midwest is the breeding ground for serial killers, lacks glamor, but remains the heartland even as the farming life that characterizes it has begun to disappear. It is the Great Plains, however, which McMurtry continually returns to and for which his most exalted lyricism is reserved. In these passages, their isolation is made profound by the endless horizon where sky and earth meet as a manifestation of the hoped-for unity between spirit and body, between past and present.
In the end, as McMurtry reconnects region to its folk history and literary legacy, the welding becomes emblematic of his desire to create a sort of redeeming alchemy between that which was, that which never was, that which is and that which never will be. His search for the “drifting fragments” of his old personality, which have gone missing since his surgery, reminds us that while such reconciliation may ultimately prove impossible, the search itself is the thing.
At times McMurtry sounds a bit like the elder statesman coming to the end of his own road. But however wistful and nostalgic he may at times sound, he is never solipsistic, self-absorbed or melodramatic. Rather, the book recommends solitude and pensive introspection, showing us that it is a worthwhile endeavor, one that makes us more humane and thus capable of creating a more sensitive and conscious self. It’s a wonderful journey that is ultimately personal and therefore all the more generous in taking us along and, in so doing, urging us to recreate our own past glories and failures, loves, losses and gains. “Roads” is a compelling invitation to rediscover what is lasting, important and true.
