About
once a year our book group decides to read a book from our
“have-been-meaning-to-read-list. This year we chose John
Steinbeck’s TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY.
Excellent choice!
There
are several reasons to love this book, but the one that reigns
supreme with me is that it is John Steinbeck, author of Grapes
of Wrath, and
East of Eden, Of
Mice and Men, and so
on. He
was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the 1962 recipient
of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I rank him with Shakespeare,
Victor Hugo, and anyone else on your all-time great author list.
While
Steinbeck was at the peak of his career, he had a pick-up truck
converted into a camper, took his French poodle, Charley, and made a
trip around the United States to find the “real” America. This
journal is a collection of the sights and people that he encountered.
The
people and places were fascinating, but I was intrigued to get such a
personal picture of the man. He was sure that he could make the
journey without being recognized. He maintained that if you are not
expecting to see someone, you don’t. Today with the voracious news
media such anonymity would be impossible.
The
second reason this was such a great read is that Steinbeck is one of
the top wordsmiths in literature. His descriptions of what he saw and
of the“locals” that he met took you along, in the cramped camper,
with him and Charley.
His
visit to the Bad Lands in North Dakota starts with his feeling as if
he were unwanted in this land designed by the devil himself. He felt
so uncomfortable that he was reluctant to write about it.
While there,
he stopped to ask a man if there was a place to buy eggs. “Powdered”
was the answer, and after trying to get the man to talk and only
receiving one word replies Steinbeck said, "You talk too much.”
“What the wife says,” was the reply.
Charley
and he camped that night in the Bad Lands to find that the setting
sun turned the barren land into a land that shouted with color.
Another
thing that made this book special for me is that I have been to many
of the places that he writes about. It was fascinating to me how
things have changed and stayed the same from his journey in 1960 to
our making a similar journey in 2013.
He
wrote of being so busy concentrating on his driving in the heavy
traffic around the major cities that he had no time to watch the
scenery nor a desire to stop to rest. Those driving conditions have
not gotten better and there seem to be longer stretches of them. He
comments on the road signs and that we have lost our use of adverbs,
“Drive slow”, “Drive safe”. That has not improved. (It is a
game we play when we travel, “correct the spelling and grammar.”)
TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY is
witty, profound, honest and moving -- oh, and sometimes angry. It needs
to be taken off your mean-to-read-someday list and read now. If the
book is a love affair with America, the reader will end up loving the
author and Charley, the French poodle.