osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2010-05-24 09:41 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2010-05-24 09:41 pm
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Book Review: Travels with Charley
It's lazy hot here, the kind of weather where there's nothing to do but sit in the shade and read - and fortunately, I found the perfect book for it: John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, a travelogue about Steinbeck and his poodle Charley's roadtrip across America in 1960.
There is a certain tempered nostalgia: he knows that old-time life wasn't what it was cracked up to be (and if he ever forgot, he could just reread Grapes of Wrath), but the growing homogenization of America pains him. "What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret it's loss nevertheless," he says.
Steinbeck was fifty-eight and married with children when he took the trip and wrote the book, and it seems to have softened him from his Grapes of Wrath years. He occasionally bursts out in beautiful snark ("We have heard [the Texans] threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization - The American Friends for Texas Secession") but mostly it reads like driving down a tree-lined two-lane highway - very soothing.
What struck me most is the feeling of layers of time. He compares America from the aughts and teens to America during his first road trip, in the thirties, to the America he's driving through now - in 1960 - when motels were called motor courts, mobile homes were the Wave of the Future, superhighways and supermarkets were new, and none of the important civil rights acts have passed.
Steinbeck stops in Louisiana at a school that's being desegregated. Every day, two children walk into the building - a little black girl flanked by US marshals and a little white child, dragged by the hand by its father, through a gauntlet of shrieking segregationists.
I wonder about the father. He was doing a brave thing, the right thing; but a horrible thing to put a child through. Someone had to do it, but you wonder how he managed to force his child through misery, the next day and the next and the next, and what the child said to him about it - then and later.
It's a good book if you've got a little extra time this summer, especially if you like travelogues or older books or books about dogs.
There is a certain tempered nostalgia: he knows that old-time life wasn't what it was cracked up to be (and if he ever forgot, he could just reread Grapes of Wrath), but the growing homogenization of America pains him. "What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret it's loss nevertheless," he says.
Steinbeck was fifty-eight and married with children when he took the trip and wrote the book, and it seems to have softened him from his Grapes of Wrath years. He occasionally bursts out in beautiful snark ("We have heard [the Texans] threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization - The American Friends for Texas Secession") but mostly it reads like driving down a tree-lined two-lane highway - very soothing.
What struck me most is the feeling of layers of time. He compares America from the aughts and teens to America during his first road trip, in the thirties, to the America he's driving through now - in 1960 - when motels were called motor courts, mobile homes were the Wave of the Future, superhighways and supermarkets were new, and none of the important civil rights acts have passed.
Steinbeck stops in Louisiana at a school that's being desegregated. Every day, two children walk into the building - a little black girl flanked by US marshals and a little white child, dragged by the hand by its father, through a gauntlet of shrieking segregationists.
I wonder about the father. He was doing a brave thing, the right thing; but a horrible thing to put a child through. Someone had to do it, but you wonder how he managed to force his child through misery, the next day and the next and the next, and what the child said to him about it - then and later.
It's a good book if you've got a little extra time this summer, especially if you like travelogues or older books or books about dogs.
no subject
I have Steinbeck on my to-read list, but for Grapes of Wrath--first things first.
no subject
On the other hand, my roommate loves both Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, so YMMV. But it might be worth it to start with Of Mice and Men or one of the other bite-size ones.