Picked Up a Hitchhiker

It's been over a month since I posted any State review for the Slackers, but after I read The Women, T. C. Boyle sort of hitched a ride along my route, and like Bobbie Magee and Janis Joplin, he lured me into his storyteller world. Since he took me to three States, I am tempted to add them as better alternatives to the current picks, if everyone wants to be a Boyle junkie like me. (Coincidentally, my "face to face" book club read Water Music at my recommendation for June, but since that is about Africa, I won't go that far afield. Except to say, that Boyle's humor, erudition and style has given me my theme for the 2010 version of the Slackers: picaresque novels.)

Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.

Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.

Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.

If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.

And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.

And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.

Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.