Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

It appears that all roads lead to Archer City, Texas. At least if you happen to be along for the ride with Larry McMurtry in his book Roads: Driving America's Great Highways; his tales of recently taken long rides, as he leaves home to head back for it.Eschewing all things touristy, though occasionally treating us to lesser known road fare, McMurtry shares with us what he admires and dislikes about car travel, travel writers, the highways he uses and avoids, and the places he passes through, oftentimes at eighty miles an hour. He drives from dawn to dusk; if he stops, he stops for gas and the occasional bowl of soup or roadside burrito.In all ways the trip is informative, insightful, and often amusing as McMurtry relates both past and present recollections and observations. He shares personal remembrances of people and places he's known and been; he is generous with his family histories, and some personal pains. He seems more the travelling book scout than the novelist he is as he talks about travel writers and their works and connects them to the places he is passing through.It is a pleasure to just sit in the passenger's seat and listen, you want the trip to last forever and you will never ask, "are we there yet?"

As someone who has driven through most of this country, I have tried to understand why I love the road and why I get restless to get in the car and drive for hours. It's not the destination; it's the travel. It was incredible to find this book because for the first time, I have found somebody who gets it, who understands it. While reading this, I relived my own adventures which not only made me happy -- but very anxious to go on another trip. Mr. McMurtry was able to find the words I've tried to find when I try to explain to others why I love long road trips. It's a wonderful narration of the impressions we all get as we travel through areas, but it also makes you think about what you may not know about your own area, such as its history or storytellers. I do not see Mr. McMurty as lonely, but very much a participant in life that nudges others into thought, introspection, and remembrance. Our worlds are what we make them, and his is as expansive as the plains.

McMurty has proven once again that the west is what has inspired his writing... As I have learned growing up in New York (which of course I love) but moving to El Paso, Tx 20 years ago....when you are out west, the farther you see, the further you think.... A must read for anyone who feels cramped... Steve Yellen

This slim volume should appeal to a variety of folks -- from couch potatoes, to occasional vacationers who pile the kids into the SUV once a summer, and especially to those 'pavement adventurers' among us who travel the interstates often. No matter what part of the country you live in, Larry McMurtry is apt to have driven through it and written at least a few sentences about it. I was fortunate enough to pick up this book just as I was returning from a 10-day drive through seven states, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about stretches of road that I had just covered myself. At the same time that he shares his geographical experiences, McMurtry also teaches you about the literature of that area -- books either ABOUT the place, or BY the authors who live(d) in it. What a nice surprise! This approach makes "Roads" a nice gift for travelers or simply for avid readers as well. If you know McMurtry only for westerns, you'll discover many more dimensions to him in this pseudo-autobiography from behind the wheel. Good, relaxing, summertime reading!

Some folks say the Interstate Highway System finally made it possible to travel from one coast of America to the other without seeing anything.But "Roads," Larry McMurtry's new collection of essays, part Jack Kerouac, part William Least Heat Moon, part travelogue, part memoir, offers a glimpse of places as remote as the human heart. This collection of essays is not as much about roads as restlessness. His routine is simple: McMurtry flies someplace, rents a car and drives home to lonesome Archer City, Texas. On his dawn-to-dusk superhighway sojourns, never slowing down for three-calendar diners, tourist traps or even to visit friends, he won't even turn on the radio. The journey itself is his destination. It's about going, not stopping. At a level as uncomplicated as a farm-to-market road, the highways of McMurtry's collection are merely threads binding together his diverse musings on Los Angeles, manifest destiny, Hemingway's furniture, the need for rattlesnakes, the callowness (and shallowness) of contemporary Hollywood, cowboys, young killers in the Heartland, old books, fatherhood, the yellow housepaint in Key Largo, great rivers, the Holy Tortilla, and short remembrances of several dead characters from his stories. His prose has the quality of conversation on a long, long drive: a meandering, intimate, unfettered discourse inspired by the passing landscape. But in a larger sense, "Roads" is a metaphor for the circular journey of McMurtry's life. It leads him to, from and through places where he considered roads not taken, or where his personal or literary paths crossed others, or simply where the quality of light through his windshield illuminated a memory."Roads" can be read as a natural sequel to "Walter Benjamin": The boy who never read Hemingway or Faulkner until he went to college now takes to the open road as a man to ponder their legacies -- and his own.