Emerson

Books Acquired: Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam; The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlien; A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

Books Read: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

I’m back chronicling my reading, a la Nick Hornby’s columns in “The Believer“, but I’ll admit my first foray back into it is a little disappointing.  First, there’s the fact that I didn’t really buy any books in May.  Lame, I know.  The three books mentioned above all came to me as gifts of sorts.  Sarah picked up a copy of A Long Way Down at the York County Library booksale, which was very thoughtful and frugal of her.  It’s the hardcover version, but has a name/address label stuck on the front cover!  I understand wanting to let people know who’s book is who’s, but ruining the cover to claim your book is like carving your initials in the hood of your car.  The other two books arrived via mail to my office.  I know I got the Halberstam from filling out a survey for some publisher about whether or not I used trade paperbacks in my classes.  I have no recollection, however, of how I received The Dumbest Generation.  That book is supposed to be about how the internet and social media is making those darn kids into, well, the dumbest generation.  I am not really predisposed to such an argument, despite teaching college freshmen, so I haven’t been all that disposed to start on that book.

Even though I received those three books in May, most of my reading time was occupied by a book that we’ve had on our shelves since before Sarah and I were married.  I bought Blue Highways for Sarah at the Half Priced Books near Rice in Houston a long time ago.  I am not sure she ever read it, but I was in the mood for a travel narrative (likely because it was the beginning of summer), so I pulled it off the shelf.  Published in 1982, it’s the memoir of a guy who is breaking up with his wife and is let go from his job, so he loads up his van and drives the back roads all around the U.S.  This sounds like a recipe for a great travel story, so I was doubly disappointed by Blue Highways.  Disappointed because a great concept didn’t pan out and disappointed due to the fact that Heat Moon seems like the fellow you would NOT want to be stuck in a van with for 12,000 miles.  He’s surly, depressing, self-absorbed and generally a grumpy old man.  As you might expect, he spends considerable time lamenting the disappearance of an America of small towns and people connected to their own past.  He’s disdainful of the fast food America, of homogenized people, places, and things.  I am in line with a lot of that.  But he’s also utterly dismissive of young people.  He picks up a hitchhiker in Minnesota and drives her to Michigan.  This leg of the journey takes several hundred miles but occupies maybe five pages of the narrative; we learn little to nothing about the girl, presumably due to Heat Moon’s lack of desire to learn anything about her or comment on what he does learn.  Despite the fact that he spends considerable time on college campuses (he often parks his van their overnight and grabs some cheap food in the dining hall), he doesn’t really care that much for college students, who are too self-centered and concerned with making money (um, yeah, Bill.  They are college students).

He does take us to some interesting places in America.  One of my favorites was a tiny town — basically an overgrown truck stop — in Nevada outside of a naval bombing range.  But he skips over a lot of the U.S. (the entire center of the nation) and drives right on through the center north.  He spends about as much time writing about western Washington to Michigan as he does writing about three towns in Maine, New Jersey, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

You may reply that, well, the travel isn’t really that much about the U.S., it’s about him.  He’s the main character and everything else is setting.  Granted, a lot of travel narratives are like this — Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman comes to mind.  But we don’t really learn that much about Heat Moon, either, nor does he seem to learn that much about himself.  Almost nothing about the events that drove him to the road (his wife, his job) are revealed.  He’s not that self reflective; we don’t get much connection between him and what he sees or who he talks to.  In the end, he admits that he hasn’t really changed much or resolved anything.  In short, Blue Highways stands as evidence for Emerson’s maxim that “travel is a fool’s paradise”.  In other words, just driving around (even around a country with as much cultural and geographic diversity as ours) isn’t going to make you a new person or solve any of your problems.  Just stay home and fix what needs fixing  — you.

That may have sounded harsh.  I am sure Bill is a nice guy who was going through a rough patch.  But Robert Penn Warren called it a “masterpiece,” which set my expectations rather high.