Version: Kobo Provided Penguin E-Book Edition
This review will be relatively short, in large part because I honestly can't remember enough of the book to feel I can really dive into it.
I read Travels with Charley over about three months, during which I took numerous breaks, got fed up with it, and generally didn't pay it the kind of attention a really good review deserves. Still, after reaching the end of it, I couldn't help but think "This would make a great book to review!" The reason for that? Well, it's an interesting book, if nothing else.
Pegged as non-fiction, but probably fitting a bit more into one of the creative non-fiction veins of memoir or personal essay, it is the account of John Steinbeck (you know, of Grapes of Wrath fame) and his drive around the United States of America in the year of 1960, with a poodle named Charley in the passenger seat. Beginning in the northeast, where he lived, Steinbeck drove through the midwest, across the northern plains to Seattle, and then down the coast of California, and finally, across Texas and into the South. Along his way he met some interesting characters, had a few run-ins with law enforcement and racists, and generally connected with a large swath of America of that time period.
But ultimately it's not the people of America that he best documented in this book. While there are a few memorable characters (and I do mean characters - according to Wikipedia large portions of the book are not consistent with Steinbeck's actual movements that year), his true successes in building this book are two fold: weaving his own personal history with that of the people and landscapes he comes across, and providing a very accurate portrait of the nation of America in the time period in which he travelled.
Having never read any Steinbeck before (no, not even The Grapes of Wrath), I had no pre-existing knowledge of the author. No sense of what style to expect, or any knowledge of his personal life beforehand. With this book, I feel I knew the man better than authors who I've read six or seven times. He deftly mixes his previous experiences with a given locale with analyses of their (then) current situation. In bringing out previous stories and experiences about a place like Chicago, he makes the place come alive while simultaneously breathing a history into it as well. The best examples of this are his stories about Seattle, the Bay area of California, where he grew up, and Texas, where he has a number of in-laws and friends. He reviles, revisits, and reabsorbs each respectively, and by the end you get a sense of a writer and observer who very keenly understood the temporal nature of what he was describing. Steinbeck, by this time an older man with some health problems, gives the reader a glimpse (albeit a contrived, and if critics cited on Wikipedia are to be believed, a bit of a false one) into the life and times of a revered American writer.
The true strength of the book, however, is in building the rough outlines of the nation that was America in 1960. I use the term "nation" very specifically, because as Steinbeck admits, there is no way to try and grasp a representative of every walk of life in one book. Instead, what he leaves you with is an imagined sense of the lives the vast majority of people in America were living at that time. It's impossible to forget, for example, his description of trailer parks and mobile homes, before the powerful stigmas of trailer trash and extreme poverty were attached to those homes. To Steinbeck, in 1960, they're a fabulous new invention that's sprouting up all over the country and populated by hard working, resourceful people who don't want to live in crowded cities or the new stretches of suburbs. It's a jarring understanding of mobile homes given the way they are constantly portrayed in media in the here and now, and his interpretation of these new living devices sticks with you. Similarly his mentions of polluted air, growing suburbs, wide open but soulless interstates, and probably most thoroughly his description of Texas, gives the reader an overview of America. Nothing more, nothing less, just a solid, complete overview of the imagined community that he builds in his mind and expresses on the page.
To sum up this point, near the end of the book, Steinbeck himself says, "When I laid the ground plan of my journey, there were definite questions to which I wanted matching answers. It didn't seem to me that they were impossible questions. I suppose they could all be lumped into the single question: 'What are Americans like today?'" (34 of 107 of Part 4 - Ebook, no page numbers for me!) At first he considers his quest to discover a suitable answer a failure, until he reflects and says, "Americans as I saw them and talked to them were indeed individuals, each one different from the others, but gradually I began to feel that the Americans exist, that they really do have generalized characteristics regardless of their states, their social and financial status, their education, their religious and their political convictions." (36 of 107 of Part 4, emphasis mine) This sense of the American people though, was "increasingly paradoxical" (36 of 107), and really, the sentence I have just quoted is as close as he ever gets to describing what he finds. Yet that's not really a failing, because what he is counting on the reader to do is wretch their own sense of these things out of the previous pages, and come up with their own sense of Americans as a people, and hence, of the place as a modern nation. It's a neat little trick, and it works well enough - you feel that he's provided you with the information, all that's left is for you to pull out the meaning behind it.
Sadly though, the book has many failings as well. For all Steinbeck's accessible style and everyman wit, some large portions of the book read very dryly. The descriptions of landscapes are likely the worst, as are some of the earlier sections about his time in New York. Even the dialogue, which I understand was once one of his strengths, doesn't read all that great. Perhaps his greatest issue though, is that he doesn't devote time to the one part of his travels (the South) that would actually warrant a full, thorough investigation of the issues. What could have been a scathing indictment against racial segregation (a la his indictment against the rich in the Grapes of Wrath) falls flat and impotent, much like Steinbeck's own, lone confrontation with a racist southerner at the end of the book. Essentially he took what could have been the most interesting quarter of the book (roughly equal with its geographic weight in the nation), and turned it into a fifty page (e-pages, that is) footnote. Maybe he was trying to say that racial conflict isn't a problem that defines America, but considering that's really the only thing he talks about at all concerning the South, it's a shame he didn't go further. In fact, he seems to purposely ignore the chance to go into further detail. He claims at the end that he remembers with perfect clarity everything on his trip up to Virginia, but his only anecdotes set in the South stop somewhere in Louisiana. It's a shame too, because the conversations he does have (with a racist and an equalist white, and with a thoroughly race-shamed black person and a young, hopeful black), are easily the best in the book. They get to the core of the whole, "What are Americans today?" question better than any other portion of the book. Yet, tellingly, they are expressed after he's posed that same question to his readers. It's almost as if the South isn't what he would consider part of America. It's historically apropos then that the South he envisioned did largely disappear in the fifty years since he wrote this book. It turned out not to be a huge part of America after all.
Another huge problems facing Steinbeck in this book, and one all travel writers essentially deal with, is that it's near impossible to get a real good sense of characters aside from the narrator. There can be no deep interplay between multiple characters leading towards a climax, as in a novel or even short story. By its very nature, everything is eternally in passing, in for a few moments and then gone again. It's simply not conducive to building a character. Without characters, there is no real action. Without action there is no conflict. And without conflict there is little to pull a reader in.
In lieu of a pantheon of fleshed out, detailed characters, the reader really has to rely on the narrator's voice to walk them through everything that is going on, to pull meaning and emotion out of the transitory events and make something for the reader to hold on to. The points where Steinbeck does this well are those outlined above, and they do a great job of engrossing the reader. Everything else though, from the descriptions of the landscapes to the issues with Charley, don't hold up nearly as well. In the end you get a good sense of what this book could have been - an amazing memoir about a man who had his finger on the pulse of a nation for most of his life. But when the best thing a book gives you is the possibility for another book entirely, it's simply not that good.
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