ROADS: Driving America's Great Highways. - Brief Article - Review - book review

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2000 by Steven G. Kellman

ROADS: Driving America's Great Highways BY LARRY MOMURTRY SIMON & SCHUSTER 2000, 208 PAGES, $25.00

Best-selling author Larry McMurtry takes the roads more traveled. In contrast to William Least Heat Moon, who writes about small, local routes that meander through America's hinterlands, McMurtry chooses to drive the nation's huge interstates. An aficionado of literary explorers like Robert Burton, Wilfred Thesiger, and Bruce Chatwin, who deliberately sought out hardships in remote deserts, jungles, or tundras, McMurtry is quick to acknowledge that he barely qualifies as a traveler. During his brief excursions, his mode of transportation is usually a rented Buick; his habitation, a Holiday Inn.

Ever since January, 1999, McMurtry leaves his home in Archer, Tex., once a month, flies to a distant airport, rents a car, and drives it about 1,000 miles, rarely stopping along the way, before returning home. The project is a challenge even to McMurtry's exceptional descriptive gifts, as he makes little effort to converse with anyone along the route, and, like fast food, interstate highways are designed to minimize surprise. Yet, despite their uniformity and the proliferation of identical franchises along their edges, McMurtry insists: "Place will always be distinct, and these notes will show, I hope, that America is still a country of immense diversity--the north ends of the roads I'm planning to drive will never be like their south ends, nor will the east be like the west."

He is not entirely convincing. He cannot disguise the dreariness of traffic jams and urban sprawl, the tedium of sitting behind a steering wheel for hours at a stretch. For all the distance covered, what keeps Roads from being pedestrian are its author's flights of fancy.

Roads derives much of its vivacity from the author's pungent pronouncements, many negative. Although he admires the energy and hardiness of Minnesotans, he expresses disdain for the people of Arkansas, Idaho, and Nashville, Tenn. He contends that Missouri is "a place to get through as rapidly as possible." Convinced that human beings are congenitally rapacious, McMurtry is resigned to environmental destruction, and, in his automotive adventures, he ignores his own contributions to global warming. Nevertheless, nostalgic for the vast, empty prairies of his youth, he is saddened by the spectacle of cotton fields replacing deserts.

McMurtry grew up on a ranch beside Highway 281, and Roads indulges his lifelong yearning to discover what lies at the end of that and other roads. Reading his book seems even more rewarding than rolling down those steady roads.

STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor