Customer Reviews

Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

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If you read Tom Robbins' latest novel closely you'll recognize Codrescu as a faculty member of Timbuktu U. In reality he's on the faculty of LSU. No Shaq in stature, Codrescu came to America in the 60's from the home of Dracula. He didn't learn to drive. Not until over two decades later. Then he hooked up with a camera crew; got his driver's lisence, and toured the same route he originally traveled upon coming to America. (No reference to Eddie Murphy's ugly movie.) Codrescu handles the English language with word play and humor. If you were alive in the Sixties, he takes you there. If you weren't, experience all of the places over again, in the present. Experience the riot torn Detroit twenty years later. Transcend in New Mexico. Sip Coffee in New Orleans. But most of all marvel at the prose that has made Codrescu a regular on NPR.

Roumanian-born poet and brand-new driver Andrei Codrescu hops in a mint red '68 Cadillac and journeys with film crew from Ellis Island to the Golden Gate, making stops in a ravaged and abandoned Detroit, a moving and shaking Chicago, the New Age and Survivalist supermarkets of the southwest, the neon kitsch of Vegas, and finally the odd peace and stability of San Francisco, where Codrescu notes, "From here on out there is nothing but ocean. You can't run any farther. You must turn around to face yourself." The book's main strength is that Codrescu never condescends to his subjects, remaining true to his observation that "what keeps us together is precisely the awed awareness of our differences...."

Towards the end of the book, Codrescu interviews City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti (an interview which didn't make it into the film documentary, by the way) who compares Henry Miller's and Kerouac's cross-country roadtrip accounts, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and On the Road, respectively: "...Miller was more focused on the reality of America whereas Kerouac was off in his Catholic consciousness more. When you read On the Road cosely, you see he really wasn't observing the reality in front of him." Other than occasional nostalgic flashbacks to the '60s, Codrescu seems to be genuinely engaged and surprised by what he finds at the well-lit fringes of American society at the end of the 20th century.

A different sort of road novel; a brief examination of (then) modern America seen through the poetically inquisitive eyes of a Romanian immigrant. Though published in the 90s, Andrei Codrescu's observations still ring true twenty years later. Not just an outsider's view, Codrescu's is an outrider's view, which may be the perspective we need to see ourselves, as opposed to the mirror reflection we get accustomed to. I found this brief passage particularly poignant:

"The true American religion is speed. When you go fast you don't notice much. In the Church of Speed, Inattention is God. If you go fast enough, you'll take the approximate over the accurate . . . the copy over the original . . . the copy of the copy over the copy . . . the ideal cowboy over the bone-tired cowpoke . . . the mythic gunslinger over the petty criminal . . . the illusion over reality . . . the fast buck over the sweaty nickel."

I love travel books. I especially love travel books about America. What I love about this book is how an immigrant poet from New Orleans learns to drive so he can see America as a driver. Even though the book was written in the 1990s, it could now be considered a history book. When you read it, you can tell your kids about the good ole days when cars were smaller than starter homes and a tank of gas cost less than a mortgage payment. For more cool, short book recommendations, visit The Lazy Readers' Book Club at [...].