Travels with "Travels with Charley"

One to chip away at a mountain of books to read is to take one book at a time, or if you're me, about 5 books at a time with a slim possibility of finishing all 5. Then there are those people that can blow through roughly a book every couple days and thus HAVE no mountain, but there's no room for THAT kind of efficiency here. No sir and/or madam. Anyway, one of the books on top of my stacks happened to be Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In search of America, and as I was about to embark on a trip myself a few days ago, I picked it up. Along with four others, three of which have only added weight to my luggage.

My background on this book is as follows: of Steinbeck's work, I've only read Grapes of Wrath, which was forced on me by well-meaning, but ultimately deleterious public high school English curriculum. Even as I read Charley, which I know is used to similar ends in other schools, I recognized that I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much had I analyzed it to death, looking for examples of imagery, simile, tone, and voice. But that's not how I read it, so yay.

Anyway, I finished Charley today and liked it much more than I didn't like it. Sometimes, Steinbeck's prose gets a touch too... hm, sentimental? Flowery? Prose-y? Sometimes, I just got the impression he thought a bit highly of his own writing. But who can blame him, I mean he was one of not many artists to make a better than decent living off his work during his own lifetime. It also kept making me smirk that Steinbeck talks about going off in search of America while he's totally pimping out this truck, not to mention he has the cash to crash in motels every few nights. I don't know, maybe these are different times than when he wrote this in the early 60s, but even being able to afford that kind of gallivant today automatically seems to distance a person from most of America. And certainly this applies to me, I'm not criticizing. Just sayin. There's something so upper-middle class about the way he writes.

To his credit, Steinbeck's observation and treatment of racial tension in America is stellar. With this theme, I think he has hit on something that is so un-ignorably a part of being American, and the way he weaves it into his observations as a whole- equally representative. Through the first three sections, he hints at racist attitudes and customs, making his own stance more or less apparent; as he travels through the Northern and Western sections of the country, this theme is quiet and unobtrusive in his anecdotes and memories. At the end of his fourth section, when he describes his travels through the South, his encounters with nauseating racism become unavoidable and indeed, take up noticeably more of the content. His composition of the racial theme into the book is so dead on: in some areas of the country (because it's not as distinct as race-blind North and racist-South), and in some aspects of daily life, it doesn't come up much, but it is there. And because of how American history unfolded and continues to unfold, there remains a big ugly monster of racial tension and oppression that we can't get around and have to deal with, and this is exactly what Steinbeck leaves the reader with, both in the events he reports and his thoughts and conversations on the topic. Cool.

Another favorite bit of mine: about a quarter of the way through the book/ the journey, our dear author wants to cross into Canada and has some troubles because of his company, Charley. His exchange with the border officials made me laugh out loud, which I didn't expect from this book or this author. So, good one, John.

Finally, I want to quote something he says that, again, is strikingly relevant to today: "With all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other..." he wants to be sure that we know he doesn't presume to give a comprehensive or definitive picture of the country; this book is a record of his experiences (206). I know media bias is older than the western world itself, but to hear (...read) it enunciated in such specific terms is reassuring and jarring at the same time.

I don't want this to turn into a full-fledged essay (12 point font, double spaced), so I'll round it off here. The informal, but still heavily composed style and arrangement make this a pleasant read which could work equally well as a quiet, solitary read or a starting point for conversation.