BOOK REVIEW: Travels With Charley

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.