Review by New York Times Review
PAUL BOWLES OBSERVED that an important difference between a tourist and a traveler "is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking." This difference also separates writers about travels from "travel writers." Is the voyaging writer telling us canny stories from a romping trip or using his peregrinations to relocate his place in the world? Sometimes it's difficult to tell. D.H. Lawrence knocked off travel essays about places in which he had arrived only a few hours before, but he was writing about himself and his intuitions. Bowles, for his part, lived for years in Morocco but traveled through the desert with a suitcase filled with his favorite neckties. Do we read either man for profound and meticulously earned insights about Sardinia or the Sahara, or for their ability to convey something about themselves as they pass through those places? Most writers are "passing through," and we expect no more of them. It's part of their charm, if they have any. And part of the sometimes dubious premise of travel writing itself. In the director John Waters's amusing CARSICK (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), he tells us up front and quite candidly that his idea to hitchhike from one of his homes in Baltimore to another of his homes in San Francisco was dreamed up as a stunt. What else would we expect from the creator of "Hairspray"? Of course, you have to be John Waters to pull this off. The celebrity hanging around rain-sodden truck stops sticking out his thumb is simultaneously the premise, the joke and the tale. So be it. The book is divided into "fiction" and "nonfiction" sections. Both relate Waters's sundry encounters with the people who give him lifts. The fictional tales are of course fantastical and plush, and when they end after 192 pages, one is slightly relieved, especially as the real tales take over with a more convincingly deadpan wit. "O.K., here's what really happened," Waters sighs, and exchanges his imaginary freaks, charlatans and drama queens for an African-American version of Tracy Turnblad, on her way to her daughter's day care. "John Waters!" she cries from the car and gives him a ride in exchange for an autograph. The next ride is offered by a middle-aged minister's wife. And so on. The transition is defter than I can describe, but did we need 192 pages to get there? In the end, "Carsick" becomes a portrait not just of America's desolate freeway nodes - though they're brilliantly evoked - but of American fame itself. It's a hoary subject, of course. Everywhere Waters goes there is either blank ignorance of his cultural status, which produces its own tart comedy, or a dividend of some kind, which he repays with a little card that reads THANKS FOR THE LIFT. (It can be autographed of course.) A sign bearing his hitchhiking plea reads MIDLIFE CRISIS. The secret of Waters's charm is the shamelessness with which he parades it, since in due course it naturally becomes its own kind of self-deprecation. As the book progresses, moreover, there's a sinister quality to the landscape's continual absence - we are in forward motion along interchangeable roads, hotels, downtowns, gas stations, inside both a writer's neurosis and his constant conversations with others. The narrative flags sometimes, but is then revived by Waters's own campily attractive tone. Is that what we want in a travel writer's voice? Not always. When I opened Iain Sinclair's AMERICAN SMOKE (Faber & Faber, $27) I felt something very different. Here is a style both measured and sumptuously wild - a beautiful, obsessive and individual style - and it's the right weapon for attacking a monumental task: visiting American towns and landscapes associated with the Beats and the writers and poets in their orbit. Sinclair begins with a small Dantean evocation: "A good step beyond midway through my dark wood of the world, I came to America, hoping to reconnect with the heroes of my youth." He does this both by launching into an idiosyncratic poetic language and by superimposing a vast and carefully plotted literary map upon an actual one, so that Lowell, Mass., say, or nearby Gloucester on its brooding sea are explored as both the mother-places of Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson and as places in and of themselves. Individuals met are rendered with humane exactitude. Here is John Sampas, Kerouac's brother-in-law, encountered in a Lowell restaurant ("Grape-bulb lights depending. Icy-white cloth. Pink napkins. Tall menus like Orders of Service at the crematorium"). "The first physical attribute that struck me about John, when he was led to our table, and after he had removed his cap, was the permanently raised eyebrows: lightly penciled accents. Punctuation marks signaling a certain fastidiousness of discourse. . . . Now he's like a senior Beat Generation diplomat, an ambassador with polished skull, silver half-moon mustache, dangling spectacles, freshly ironed shirt. A man for whom there will always be lunches." Sinclair redraws all the strange connections that once bound poets and writers across the Atlantic. Olson and his friend Ed Dorn were cherished correspondents of the extraordinary Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne, whom Sinclair fondly remembers for his funereal corduroys and austere manners. Marvelously, the man is perfectly recalled. I, too, remember the lofty, lisping Jeremy Prynne at a later time, striding about his cloisters at Gonville and Caius like a character out of Gormenghast. But who would have recalled his friendship with a man like Olson? Sinclair reconstructs whole lineages of influences and friendships, many of them conducted through small poetry magazines. His own journey becomes a collective biography of generations. Sinclair shows how they interweave in a hundred cities and places. The Americas wash up in England, just as Sinclair has now washed up in the Americas: "Certain figures, in transit," he writes, "between Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Havana, Mexico City, Rome, Athens, Johannesburg, fetch up on the fringes of Hampstead Heath: in Highgate, West Hampstead, even Kentish Town. And they stick, they nest. They like the cafes, the sad bookshops. The indifference of London suits them. Our nicely managed corruption. The potential for disappearance." Unexpectedly, this potentially dry exercise quickly becomes wonderfully gripping, a kind of Bolaño-esque kaleidoscope of mad poets colliding in space and time. And speaking of Bolaño, midway through his book Sinclair suddenly recalls that he had decided to put off his departure to America and visit the dead Chilean's last abode in Blanes, near Barcelona, a place that's "discounted, mythologized, less than itself." The banality of Blanes, with its hideous Paseo Marítimo and its "retail-park outskirts," is like the left-behind towns in the Americas graced by the memory of Beat eminence. But what do we expect from such places anyway? Writers leave few traces behind them. To wander through the places they haunted is merely to pursue their ghosts. The determination to find an individual's traces is, however, now a common motivation behind the travel narrative since it lends to any given voyage a surplus dimension, that of biography. We could call it the "in the footsteps" school, and it's the chosen method of Tim Butcher, The Daily Telegraph's former Africa bureau chief, in THE TRIGGER (Grove, $26). Butcher embarks on a walk across a mountainous area of Bosnia in the more or less exact footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that fateful day in June 1914, setting in motion the slaughter of World War I. Seven years earlier, in 1907, when he was 13, Princip had walked from his home village of Obljaj, in a remote area known as Herzegovina, to a town called Bugojno and from there traveled by rail to Sarajevo. Butcher decides to do the same. It's an elegant enough way of opening up the history of the Balkans and its conflicts, and of exploring the wider perspective. Butcher was a war correspondent in this region in the 1990s and saw much of the horror of that period firsthand; he is fascinated by the obscure origins of wars. Though he relies a bit too much, for my taste, on the journalist's habit of earnestly setting down interviews (his own voice is more interesting), his prose is kept afloat by carefully acquired knowledge and a reporter's quick eye. The fracture lines that run through the Balkans, between Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers, between Christians and Muslims, between Slavs and Ottomans, are parsed peripatetically as he wanders with backpack across the mountains, the follower not just of the rash and excitable Princip but also of Rebecca West, whose "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is perhaps the greatest work on the Balkans the English language is likely to produce. His own book is an honorable follow-up, and contrast, to West's. This is not to say that Butcher doesn't sometimes mishandle small historical details. When "Turkish forces from Asia Minor" conquered the Balkans in the 15th century, he tells us, they were "outriders of the Ottoman Empire that replaced Byzantium, renaming as Istanbul the old Byzantine capital of Constantinople." In fact, the Turks had had a capital at Edirne in Europe since the 14th century, and they never renamed Istanbul. It was officially called Constantinople throughout the Ottoman period and was finally renamed Istanbul after the empire's dissolution and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey - in order, precisely, to emphasize a clean break with the Ottoman past. Does this matter? The Ottomans valued Roman imperial legitimacy and went to some lengths to obtain it. It was one of the reasons they ruled so successfully in the Balkans, and Butcher does a nice job of showing how later, in the 19th century, it was the conquering AustroHungarians who were the aliens in the Balkans when they finally displaced the Ottomans. Their overblown official buildings, their railway stations and theaters seemed and still seem out of place in a way the graceful, Byzantine-inspired Ottoman mosques do not. But more to Butcher's point are the places in Bosnia where recent mystical nationalism and violence converge - places like Srebrenica, which he visits in a fine chapter called "A Mystical Journey." (It was Princip, under police interrogation in 1914, who used the word to describe his own journey through the region.) Butcher joins the annual Mars Mira, or peace march, which takes him through landscapes that have - like the march itself - an "undertow of horror." And yet, "there were pastures where the grass had been scythed and gathered up into ricks as tall as houses. There were mountain streams where my fishing radar twitched, glistening reaches of clear water rich in the promise of wild trout. ... In one section of forest we passed a stecak, one of the medieval boxlike Bosnian tombstones that date from the era when the various eastern and western forms of Christianity struggled for supremacy among the south Slavs. ... The centuries had knocked it askew, but the surface of the gray rock bore circular repetitive carvings." Where the land is itself a kind of historical geology, the writer's eye merely has to notice such details to convey the irrational origins of war. The "in the footsteps" genre, however, can also take a lighter form, as Diccon Bewes shows in his SLOW TRAIN TO SWITZERLAND (Nicholas Brealey, cloth, $29.95; paper, $19.95), a retreading of a pioneering 1863 trip by a group called the Junior United Alpine Club - seven English men and women whisked through the snowy peaks by Thomas Cook's first organized tour of Helvetia. Bewes claims that this adventure marked the beginning of the modern tourism industry, and who are we to disagree? It's a more amusing book than I had expected, not least because the genteel comedy of manners of the English tourists of 1863 is an offshoot of the fact that Switzerland to the Victorians was as threateningly exotic as Irian Jaya is to us today. Those Continental skating practices! Hiking over the Mer de Glace with a black parasol! It appeared that the mid-19th-century Swiss had heated baths, and today, as Bewes reports, even rustic Unterseen has acquired a "Table Dance Night Club." Progress is inexorable. But not all journeys are. Some are perpetual digressions, as is the case with the travels of Philip Hoare in his fascinating travelogue, THE SEA INSIDE (Melville House, $27.99). Hoare has adopted the Sebald approach, complete with text-embedded photographs and artwork, as he wanders around and across a variety of seas from England to New Zealand in search of their tales, lore, history, ecology, biological complexity and elusive beauty. Each chapter is named for a sea, but not an actual one. There is a "wandering sea," a "silent sea," a "suburban sea" and finally a "sea in me." The mystical tone is deliberate, enabling Hoare to replace a linear narrative with a circuitous one. Here, it goes without saying, the digression is everything, and the tale is in the roundabout telling. The journey is in the digression. Occasionally, one feels lost in this maze - but does it matter? One of the better intellectual side trips is on ravens, and during its many pages I began to lay down my readerly objections as to why I was reading about ravens and quietly consented to learn all about the Corvus corax. It's the same with whales, dolphins, the naturalist T.H. White, the iconoclast theologian Thomas Merton (killed by an electric fan at a conference center not far from my own adopted city of Bangkok), the coasts of Sri Lanka and, of all things, thylacines - extinct Australian marsupials with the heads of dogs. This happy trade-off doesn't work throughout, though I'm inclined to admire the ambition and the generosity of spirit that's in play. Hoare continually reaches for the transcendent and often finds it. The digression-as-tale method, though, can sometimes feel curiously arch and self-conscious because it assumes the writer is assembling a gigantic thesaurus of exotica and wonders whose splendors will be obviously enthralling. Hoare is a good writer, so he can pull this off. But I sometimes wished he had tried his hand at some good old-fashioned linearity. That said, and on a side note, I also relished his command of and frequent resort to Anglo-Saxon (a language that should be quoted more often!). I, for one, did not know that our ancestors had a special and very beautiful word for the half-lit hour before dawn, as revealed by the anonymous writer of the poem "The Wanderer" (the ultimate traveler's poem): uhta. That gave me enough pleasure for a whole week. LAWRENCE OSBORNE'S most recent books are "The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker's Journey" and two novels, "The Ballad of a Small Player" and "The Forgiven."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* There's nothing cheaper, ungenerous about Waters, the Pope of Trash (or Filth, or both). His new book is actually three (clap!), three (clap!), three books in one! All are based on the pitch he sold his publisher about hitchhiking from his home in Baltimore to his home in San Francisco. Oh, he knew it was insane I'm sixty-six years old, for chrissake and so wrote it up in advance, just in case, once imagining The Best That Could Happen, then again envisioning The Worst That Could Happen. Because he is, after all, John Pink Flamingos Waters, both fictional trips are rather similar in terms of weirdness and even scabrousness, at least in the eyes of those who aren't J PF W. Fortunately, except for a handful of incidents (well, maybe more) that body-slam the boundaries of scatological toleration, both are pretty constantly hilarious and, when he somehow encounters such figures from his past as Edith Massey (the Egg Lady in PF) and 1980s gay porn star Johnny Davenport (whom Waters never knew, casually or biblically alas!), sentimental. The real trip, hardly as ludicrous as the preceding fictions, takes longer, involves more drivers, and has Waters growing in admiration for the regular but far from colorless! people who pick him up, especially the married guys who praise their wives to the skies. Travel uh, hitchhiking book of the year?--Olson, Ray Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The illustrious director of Hairspray, Cry Baby, and Pink Flamingoes embarked on a cross-country hitchhiking journey in 2012. This, Waters's seventh book, is a travelogue of his experiences bumming rides all the way from his home in Baltimore to his apartment in San Francisco. Waters idiosyncratically cuts to the core of American diversity, finding the good (and bad) in any situation with biting wit. The unlikely friendship Waters forms with a young Republican politician is an unexpected twist, and a timely tale of bromance in the midst of hardship. If a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and the pope of Trash can have an adventure in Reno together, aren't all things still possible in this world? But for Waters aficionados, the best parts of this enchanting narrative aren't the ones that actually happened. Fans will delight in the two novellas, with Waters at his campiest and most ludicrous, that precede the nonfiction third act. Presenting the best- and worst-case scenarios for modern hitchhiking as only Waters can, the narratives range from encounters with a pleasant group of marijuana smugglers and Edith Massey, to a harrowing imprisonment in Kansas and traumatic fan meeting. Waters devotees take note: this is required reading. Agent: Bill Clegg, William Morris Endeavor. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The cult filmmaker embarks on a madcap, solo cross-country hitchhiking trip, carrying a backup cardboard sign that reassuringly states, "I'M NOT A PSYCHO." En route to San Francisco, he meets a diverse cast of characters including a pot dealer who's willing to finance his next project, a cop who mistakes him for Steve Buscemi, and a lusty demolition car driver. Waters's brief encounters are colorful and campy, and his road reports-lascivious fantasies and all-are highly entertaining. (LJ 5/15/14) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Face it: Wouldn't you rather strike out on the road with John Waters than Jack Kerouac?If the answer is yes, then this book is for you, even if Waters (Role Models, 2011, etc.), the ever-flamboyant auteur-(Pink Flamingos, Hairspray et al) turned-writer, takes his sweet time getting going. For more than half of this account of his 2012 cross-country journey hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco, the author imagines what lies in store, with dueling full-length novellas that spin best and worst case scenarios. Best: a never-ending thrill ride full of rich potheads, happy freaks and horny hunks, all of whom know and love his work. Worst: The trip west is seething with small-town homophobes, stage moms, crazed environmentalists and serial killers. The real story, once it arrives, is a welcome relief, as the truth is more hilarious and interesting than Waters' nuttiest fantasies. He dealt with troubles he didn't expect, like tedium or the art of making a marketable cardboard sign. (He eventually ditched his original sign, "I'm Not Psycho," wisely realizing that "hitchhiking is not the time to be a comedian.") Waters hitched rides with a preacher's wife, a hay farmer and an indie band, and he struck up a budding bromance with a straight, young Maryland Republican city councilman. The author was grateful that, even in the hinterlands, C-list celebrity status could be a real asset and was even more touched by the kindness of people who didn't know him at all. Somewho apparently didn't notice his BlackBerry, tracking device or designer sports jacketeven offered money, which he gently refused ("Yeah sure, I see her thinking, here's a homeless person off his meds").The book idles way too long, but once it takes off, it's a sweet and funny ride. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
