Benjamin Markovits's Reading List

"It’s hard to have a road trip list without On the Road . I am not much of a beatnik, but you can’t help but admire the appetite for life that this book celebrates. Or, ‘celebrates’ is too strong, because they go through lots of miserable times. One of the things I like is that when he sets off on this great, transcendent road trip that is the purpose of the book, he actually has dumb ideas about the clothes he should wear. He wears the wrong shoes. He tries to hitchhike on a road where there’s not enough traffic and ends up having to go back to New York City to take a bus. It doesn’t always end well. And the drink and the drugs produce a lot of ecstatic moments, but they produce a lot of unhappiness too. “As soon as you can convince readers that you’re playing with real money, low-stakes bets feel suddenly important” Even though it’s not an unmixed celebration, still, at the heart of it, there’s this appetite for life. He wants to see America, he wants to experience the world. That is, as we talked about earlier, what the road trip is about."

"That’s right. This is as far from ecstatic as you can get. This is a much more middle-aged road trip than On the Road . It’s the second of the Frank Bascombe series of books. The premise of the first— The Sportswriter — is that their kid has died and they are struggling to come to terms with the aftermath. Now, the guy who had been a writer in Independence Day has decided to give up writing and is going to get into real estate. Real estate turns out to be existentially interesting to him, because where you make your home is a question that everyone faces. He’s setting out to visit his ex-wife, and to take their son on a trip to the various sporting Halls of Fame that are available to them. The reason I really love the Bascombe novels, and this may be the most perfect example, is that Ford manages to make the minute-by-minute passage of time interesting. His characters aren’t always doing incredibly interesting things, but the context is so rich in their layered reminiscences and sense of what the stakes are, that you can just spend hours with him as he goes about his relatively boring road trip. I think that’s an amazing achievement. My cheesy analogy is that a lot of novels seem to play with Monopoly money, in which case you have to buy more and more hotels and have more and more extravagant action for anything to seem to matter. But as soon as you can convince readers that you’re playing with real money, suddenly low-stakes bets feel very important."

"What impact did it make? They’re on a beach holiday as a family. She ends up hitchhiking and setting up in a new town. I think what’s great is that she ends up reproducing the domestic frustrations of the life she had left behind, because she turns out to be somebody who is really helpful, and can’t stop being helpful. I think that’s true of a lot of pioneering stories: you have this idea that you’re going to leave everything behind and start afresh, but inevitably you end up reproducing the world you left behind, because there was a reason that was your world in the first place. Yes, you’ve got to run somewhere . And wherever that turns out to be will have its own qualities and difficulties. So even if you’re not trying to escape yourself, as soon as your destination stops being vague and turns into somewhere specific, it will involve dealing with the usual worries about money and work and whatever it is that drove you away in the first place. Yes, it’s not a miserable family. Her kids are not awful. It’s okay. And in fact the life she makes for herself in the new town is not a disaster either. But in the end she comes back to her old life, because at some point—when there’s so little to choose between them—she may as well stick with the version where she has roots and where people love her. It’s not a road trip novel, but if I could I would have included Thoreau’s Walden on the list, because it is a classic opting-out book. He spent two years in his cabin in the woods. Although one of the frustrations of Walden is that he never totally explains why he leaves at the end of it, and goes back to what he somewhat mockingly calls ‘civilised life’ again. Maybe he just got a little bored. He went there to get out of a rut. But there’s a danger that wherever you end up turns into another rut, and you will have to get moving again. I think it’s a great account of that desire to start again, even in a very minimalist way."

"Yeah. I mean, eventually. Although at the beginning he is only 26, although he is married with a kid, with another kid on the way. Midlife maybe began earlier then. He’s in a dead-end job. And, actually, I looked into the ‘midlife crisis’ term, and it was coined by a Canadian psychoanalyst who had in mind men in their mid-thirties. So he’s not so far off that. He’s determined to get the hell out of Dodge, and wants to drive to the coast although he never quite makes it because the tangle of American highways somehow obstructs him. He ends up moving one township away and shacking up with a woman that his old basketball coach introduced him to, and being no happier than he was before. He reproduces the same kind of domestic mess he was trying to escape from in the first place. And we should talk about the car. I’ve done a couple of road trips across the States, and one of the things that happens is that the car becomes your home. It’s the only constant in your life. If you’re stopping in motels or camping or staying at friends’ houses, the car is the one place that you feel is consistent in your life. The appeal of that in Rabbit, Run and all these other books is that in the car you have a home that you can take with you. You’re a turtle with a shell on your back. There’s a line about writing novels I once heard: that writing a novel is like driving on a mountain road late at night. You should know where you’re trying to get to, but all you need to see, moment by moment, is as far as your headlights. Something like that. Anyway, The road trip novel makes that literal, you want to have some sense of a destination, but all you ever have to worry about is the next thirty yards. In the case of my book, he wants to drive to see his son at grad school in California. That’s the target. Also, his dad is buried there, so he has complex family reasons for wanting to make it to the coast. He knows he’s going to get there, and the question is, how. Somebody once asked me if there was an English equivalent to the road trip novel. And there is, it’s just not in a car. It’s that hiking story. Or a biking story. Or Three Men in a Boat . Even classic English novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles turn out to involve a lot of walking from one place to another. Because of the size of the country, you have this feeling when you walk out of one village and trek three miles to another village, you’ve actually gotten somewhere. The character of the place has changed."

"Yeah, it’s a couple of creative writing students. You don’t really think of 1939 as a heyday of creative writing, but they have gone to Kenyon College in Ohio to learn to write, and a couple of them decide to spend Thanksgiving weekend driving down to New York City to see their fiancés, and everything goes about as wrong as you might wish. What it is really about is the gap between the sense they have of themselves when they set off, when they are bragging to their housemates and buddies that they may never come back, and the sense they have of themselves when they return, after having a little taste of the life that awaits them. They are still just college students hanging out with their pals at Kenyon, but they’ve had a glimpse of who they might slowly become. I think that’s right. The genius is in the telling, in Peter Taylor’s case. There’s this wonderful episode—maybe this encapsulates it—where their car breaks down and they have to get a train back to university. And you have the rhythm of the train, which sticks in the mind of the narrator like a tune, and the rhythm has been turned into words, and the words are: Not yet, not yet, not yet. You’ve not yet become the person that you will probably end up being. That phrase sticks with him even once he returns to his dorm room house and has A late snack with all his buddies, who have taken over their rooms because they have the nicest rooms in the house. They start having a midnight feast, and they return to that scene with all their friends having invaded what was their home. And that phrase keeps coming back to him: Not yet, not yet, not yet. Something’s coming. There’s a sense of anticipation, of where the road will lead you, and who you might turn out to be at the end of it."