Rough Drift
No one travels light in two new road novels.
Books
Here’s how you make a myth: Describe how heart-stoppingly overwhelming a place is, then introduce somebody capable of controlling it. In antiquity, all manner of gods and galley ships were required to get that job done; by the end of the 19th century, Huck Finn launching a raft down the Mississippi was plenty. Ever since Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published in 1957, the road story has been the preferred American myth, and Rudolph Wurlitzer knows road stories: Though he’s written five novels, he’s probably best known as the screenwriter of the 1971 cult film Two-Lane Blacktop, an inheritor to Easy Rider that revised the idea of Manifest Destiny to include two guys in a ’55 Chevy purring across the rural landscape.
Wurlitzer’s version of the road myth resembled a lot of Beat-era tales: You had no idea where you were going and weren’t always having a lot of fun, but at least you were moving—the movement itself a character-building exercise. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, the stars of Two-Lane Blacktop, are so stone-faced and archetypal they don’t even have names; they’re the Driver and the Mechanic, and they passive-aggressively court a Girl. Wurlitzer had less success applying the Beat sensibility to his screenplay for the 1987 Walker, which starred Ed Harris as a would-be imperialist in 19th-century Nicaragua. Alex Cox’s film was too sloppy to work as a satire of Reagan-era military adventures in Central America, but it underlined Wurlitzer’s belief that the idea of humble American rugged individualism is hogwash—we do all this running around not for spiritual enlightenment but as a means to control.... Continued
Fri. May. 9, 2008 - Thu. May. 15, 2008
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