cross country conflicted

Perhaps you recall that I was reading Cross Country by Robert Sullivan. It took me over three weeks to get through the book, much longer than it did for Sullivan and family to make the trip he describes. This wasn’t because the book was bad, but because the post office kept interrupting my reading days.

I was going to write a full fledged review but I think I’ll just link to this one  by Bruce Barcott, and this one by Finn-Olaf Jones instead. Both reviews come from the New York Times and may require you to set up a free account to read them.

Barcott liked the book, Jones did not. Says the former:

One of the great pleasures of “Cross Country” comes in watching Sullivan go through the various stages of the road trip, from irrational exuberance on Day 1 to face-slapping desperation in the late hours of Day 5. He’s a sweet, old-fashioned father and husband. In an age of OnStar and G.P.S. units, he travels with TripTik maps from AAA. There are no iPods or DVD players for the kids; they make do with the radio and magazines. Sullivan possesses enough self-awareness to make fun of himself when, for instance, he asks, “Hey, who wants to read from the Lewis and Clark journals this time?

But Jones quibbles:

the six-day drive stretches into 372 pages of mind-numbing logistics: a troublesome roof pack is installed, adjusted and readjusted ad nauseam; “enough coffee to drown an elephant” is described cup by cup; a quest for the next Holiday Inn Express seems to take longer than Lewis and Clark’s crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains.

There are moments of brilliance along the way. But the verbose text, like the notes that pioneers deposited along old Western wagon trails, encourages the reader to take shortcuts. Too bad Mr. Sullivan or an editor didn’t take them first.

Me? I think both are right. The book could easily have been shortened by a third and been a better work. But though Cross Country is a long journey, it offers more than its share of rewards, like this passage from the early pages:

“The America that I see, is an America that tells you to keep moving, to move on to something better, to get on the road and keep going, to stop only briefly to refuel your car and yourself but then to keep pushing toward the place that is closer to where you should be, or could be, if only you would keep going. America says move, move on, don’t sit still. . . . In other words, America is the road.”

Which is a thought that kept rattling around in my own head when I made a very nearly cross country road trip last September.

I liked Cross Country enough that I mooched another of Sullivan’s books, which just arrived in the mail today. It is the intriguingly titled, How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn’t So Bad.

I’ll be sure to let you know how this one goes, once I get to it.

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Saturday really is a slow day on the web. It may be that most of the rest of the world has a life. What do you think?