Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.
I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.
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