Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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This dazzling new road book deserves a soundtrack, so cue up the Steppenwolf:
"Get your motor runnin'/ head out on the highway/ lookin' for adventure/ or whatever comes our way ..."
Robert Sullivan's "Cross Country" is just as irresistible as "Born To Be Wild," that immortal road anthem. The Brooklyn-based literary journalist has crafted an absolute tour de force on touring, an American trip saga that surely will stand as a classic account of this country's long love affair with open highways and possibilities somewhere ahead.
This turns out to be an inspired match of material and writer. Sullivan -- whose quirky sensibilities have resulted in a best-selling book on rats as well as a fine account of the whale hunt by the Makah Tribe -- could be the uncrowned king of road tripping.
Sullivan, 43, has crossed the county about 30 times, putting 90,000 miles on the odometers of various vehicles, from a Volvo, a Camry and a Subaru to rented moving trucks and cars, including a Chevrolet Impala, an American icon once as popular as Kellogg's Corn Flakes. He has crossed the country alone, he has crossed the country accompanied by the woman who was then his girlfriend and later his wife, and also accompanied by their first child, and then their second, too. In 2001, the writer made six trips across the country, racking up 18,000 miles.
Part of the reason for these transcontinental treks is that Sullivan's family lives in the New York area and his wife's family lives in Portland, Ore. But the truth is, he has been bit hard by the road-trip bug and can't stop scratching the itch. The highway titillates his insatiable curiosity about all manner of things -- historic, commonplace, obscure.
"Cross Country" is centered on a road trip from Portland to New York by the four Sullivans in the summer of 2004. But Sullivan only uses that trip as a framework to riff on past trips (from romantic to apocalyptic), voluminous readings of other transcontinentalists (from Lewis & Clark to Emily Post), plus roadside observations (the delights of squeegeeing bugs from the windshield).
It is a challenging juggling act for a writer, very chancy. Sullivan changes subjects almost as often as the Impala must have changed lanes, but he is a master of jazz narrative, so many twists and turns that readers can only be enthralled and bedazzled.
Best of all, despite his vast experience, Sullivan is not an easy rider. He is a cranky, obsessed, intense, wacky, unspontaneous, coffee-addled worrywart whose teenage son has to admonish dad to mellow out after one of those inevitable road-trip conflict moments when, as he recounts, "I am asking my wife to read the map, and then getting upset with how she is reading it, and then she is telling me to read the map for myself."
Sullivan is a hapless everyman, who falls prey to all the weird foibles that bedevil long-distance road-trippers, and who is often aghast. Sullivan is a relentless researcher, who delights in uncovering untruths (that Indians often attacked the covered wagons of settlers heading west in the 1840s), oddities (the evolution of the travel cup lid) and important historical developments (that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "father of the interstates," was unaware that bureaucrats had altered original plans to have the interstates be routed around cities, like German autobahns, and routed them right through urban centers, with disastrous results).
Sullivan is also an incurable wisecracker who unleashes many laugh-out-loud quips, including: "The engine was making sounds that I had previously only associated with the demolition industry or plate tectonics."
Only in the concluding 50 pages of "Cross Country" does Sullivan's narrative juggling begin to seem a tad tired instead of inspired. But that, in an odd way, mirrors the mindset of transcontinental trekkers nearing their destination, as many Americans will discover during these summer driving days.
Robert Sullivan discusses "Cross Country" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 206-624-6600, and at 7 p.m. Thursday, Third Place Books, 206-366-3333.
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