REVIEW
Road trip makes for a long haul
Elizabeth Corcoran
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Cross Country
By Robert Sullivan
BLOOMSBURY; 389 PAGES; $24.95
With an anecdote here, a dash of history there, and some very long sentences that wind their way across the white pages like the interstate highway he is following, Robert Sullivan establishes the herky-jerky rhythm of his new traveler's tale, "Cross Country."
Sullivan has been celebrated for his verbal pointillism, for telling a big story with hundreds of tiny deft observations. The technique succeeded brilliantly in his best-seller, "Rats," a story of New York City, which he told by spending hundreds of hours scrutinizing the daily affairs of rats in a particular alley in Manhattan. Unfortunately, when his canvas is stretched across the whole of the United States, Sullivan's portrait work gets blurry and vague.
Sullivan wants us to know straight away that he is a road warrior. He has crossed the country 27 times, he declares, "more than anyone I know who is not a trucker or professional driver of some kind." The backbone of this book is a recent five-day sprint across mostly interstate highways, from west to east. (Sullivan, his wife and two children are heading to New York to attend a wedding.) Sullivan fills out the book by reminiscing about earlier cross-country treks and digressing into local history. Lewis and Clark are heroes. So is, to a lesser degree, Kemmons Wilson, who created Holiday Inn.
Travelers who have crossed some part of this country have spun epic tales. A carpenter who was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition wrote an early account of that legendary trip. (Lewis' and Clark's own journals were eventually published, too.) So many others have put color and sizzle into road stories, including Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon. As armchair travelers, we hitchhike with them to discover places we've never been, to meet people we will never see or to simply have a great read.
Hitchhiking with the Sullivans in their rented Impala, however, is tame stuff. Sullivan lectures his family about Lewis and Clark. His daughter sleeps. His son flips through rock 'n' roll magazines. His wife quilts.
"And in the car, I am -- like a tour director nobody paid for, like a tour guide nobody can stop, like a human roadside plaque -- going on and on about those famous first cross-country travelers, Lewis and Clark, just two among a long line of people I mention. I wish I could control myself; my explications worry me, to some extent. Yes, you, the reader, can put this book down and walk away for a few minutes or even forever, but my family is, at least for a few country-crossing days, stuck with me, trapped."
The Sullivan gang stops briefly at some drop-dead scenic spots, starting with the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. The gorge is just a few hours from where they started. Sullivan says he has visited it many times. Even so, it seems to render him speechless. " 'The gorge is so incredible,' I am saying regularly -- did I mention that I'm a nightmare to travel with?" Sullivan is at his best when he unwraps forgotten chunks of Americana: stories about men such as Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who showed his vision of a "streamlined" future at the 1939 World's Fair; why American roadside food features hamburgers instead of hotdogs; and the origins of the "drink-through lids" for coffee cups.
He also has a few fun personal stories, too, such as the time (on an earlier trip) when he and his wife were searching for an exhibition of Jack Kerouac's scrawled scroll of a manuscript for "On the Road." They made it to Boulder, Colo., only to learn the exhibition had closed because of lack of funds. A friendly waiter at an organic restaurant pointed them to the Beat Book Store, and its proprietor, a self-appointed high priest of Kerouacian studies. As much as Sullivan likes to hear the sound of his own voice, he doesn't seem very interested in what anybody else has to say. Not even Evel Knievel, the motorcycle daredevil, gets in a word edgewise. Sullivan describes how (again, on an earlier trip) he and his wife stopped for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Butte, Mont. There, across the room, a waiter tells them, is the famous Knievel.
When they finish dinner, Sullivan, with a toddler in tow, passes Knievel's table. "Mrs. Knievel stopped us and then pointed to our son. 'What a cutey,' she said, motioning to Evel. At that moment, Evel Knievel seemed to look up. ... It was as if we had connected with a piece of America, or a piece of the American dream, but then again, for a connection you at least need to make eye contact, and when I think back on the experience, eye contact was not what happened."
Sullivan shies from touching America or from letting America touch him. I certainly feel that way about Manhattan alley rats. But great road trip stories should take you somewhere beyond the final spot on the AAA TripTik map.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/11/DDGAFJRN691.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
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