American Ramble by Neil King Jr.

This trip was different. On a fresh morning in late March, I stepped past the threshold of our front door, tugged the garden gate closed behind me, and set off to walk to the city of New York. A slow stroll, I liked to say, down a fast lane. An easy walk along a founding swath of the country that most travelers want to put behind them. A congested landscape usually seen as a blur, along a corridor named for a train, the Acela, whose name in turn is a faster form of accelerate. Ad + celerare, from the Latin: toward something, whatever it is, swiftly; to hasten the occurrence of a thing you want over.

No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over.

In 2021, journalist Neil King, Jr. set off from his home in Washington, D.C. to walk all the way to New York City. The journey, as he describes it in his book American Ramble, was conceived after a frightening bout with esophageal cancer that left his voice strained--a lasting mark that colors each interaction with the people he meets on his journey. Cancer, King found, contracted time and space, made things slow down, and each day seem precious and full of wonders. In a way, a journey on foot, as opposed to the machines of modern convenience, does the same thing. What would it be like, King wonders, to walk through the most heavily trafficked corridor in America, not by automobile or train, but on foot?

It's not a fair comparison, but throughout American Ramble I couldn't help but think of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, perhaps because I was so impressed by that book that I still have it on the brain. But I do think they have in common a kind of take-things-as-they-come approach: for Heat-Moon, the program is not a list of destinations, but the back routes on the highway; similarly, King is constrained to come across landmarks and communities as he finds them. I wished, in fact, that he had done a little more to synthesize the different stops on his trip, or perhaps to synthesize them in a way that was more historical and contextual than personal. What I liked best about the book is the way it reveals certain historical themes of this particular landscape that have been buried by urban sprawl and the great highways. King's route takes him through the crucibles of the American Revolution, including Valley Forge and the Delaware River, which he pointedly crosses at the same place that Washington did. It also takes him through the heartland of American religious pacificism, including the Amish country of southeastern Ohio and the vestiges of Quaker and Shaker culture. In each individual instance, King, a journalist, does a great job of investigating the particularities of place and history, but there is a larger story that emerges from the happenstance of the route that I felt was missing, somehow.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore that momentousness of the feat by the end of the book. King makes it clear that this isn't the roughing-it style hitchhiking of his youth; he stays in hotels and AirBNBs and his meals are restaurant fish tacos, not Vienna sausages on a camp stove. And yet, by the time he strolls into New York's Central Park, he's traversed some of the most pedestrian-hostile landscapes on the face of the planet, including the great wastes of warehouses he calls "Amazonia." More than a story of physical triumph, it's a story of resolve, and a stubborn desire to see a familiar landscape in a new way. 

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Julian English sat there watching him, through eyes that he permitted to appear sleepier than they felt.  Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly?  Why couldn't he stand him?  What was there about Reilly that caused him to say to himself: "If he starts one more of those moth-eaten stories I'll throw this drink in his face."  But he knew he would not throw this drink or any other drink in Harry Reilly's face.  Still, it was fun to think about... Yes, it would be fun to watch.  The whole drink, including the three round-cornered lumps of ice.  At least one lump would hit Reilly in the eye, and the liquid would splash all over his shirt, slowly wilting it as the Scotch and soda trickled down the bosom to the crevice at the waistcoat.  The other people would stand up in amazed confusion.  "Why, Ju!" they would say.  Caroline would say, "Julian!"

Appointment in Samarra begins with Julian English, a member of the social elite in the medium-sized town of Gibbsville, PA, drunkenly throws a drink in the face of a man he dislikes.  This relatively minor crime sets into motion a series of events that leads to Julian becoming a social and professional pariah, the dissolution of his marriage, and eventually--spoiler alert--his own suicide.

I knew that about the novel going in, and expected it to be something like the short-lived NBC series The Slap--about how the repercussions of a small misdeed snowball into something dramatic and chaotic.  But that's not really the way that it plays out in Appointment in Samarra.  O'Hara teases us with the possibility that the social world will collapse around Julian.  Julian worries, for instance, that his assault on Harry means that the Catholic bloc in Gibbsville has turned against him, customers he needs as a Cadillac dealer.  O'Hara introduces a minor mobster, and gives him immense "screen time" to suggest that somehow Julian will end up in trouble with the mob--and he does, but it blows over quickly.  No, it's not the actual collapse but the threat of collapse that causes Julian, a hard drinker and a weaker man than he would confess to, to get drunk, and climb into his own car, running in the driveway.

Fran Lebowitz called O'Hara "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald."  You can see what she's talking about: the corruption of the social scene, the burden of wealth, it's all there.  But The Great Gatsby, for all its essential sadness, takes place on a grand stage.  It's a tragedy in the Greek sense; the downfall of a great man.  The sadness of Appointment in Samarra is of a different kind.  Julian's suicide is affecting because it seems so pointless.  His marriage would have survived.  His social standing would have too, but if it hadn't, what then?  Gibbsville is hardly New York City--it's more like the small, snow-covered Midwestern towns that Nick Carraway dreams of returning to.  In his intoxication, Julian wants his suicide to be what a lot of suicides want--a grand gesture that will alter the landscape of those around him.  In the end, the smallness of the landscape makes the gesture small.  When it's all over, there's no catharsis to be had here; just a bitter taste in your mouth.

News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

The fictional town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania exists. Anyone who has been to Franklin, Oil City, Mercer, or any number of hamlets and coal towns throughout the Quaker State would recognize it. The Episcopal church two blocks from the Catholic church two blocks from the Baptist church, families made wealthy by coal, out-of-work coal miners not sure what else they can do, land scarred by unscrupulous strip-mining companies, the high school athlete who's the talk of the town: all familiar.

Jennifer Haigh returns to her town of Bakerton with this collection of ten interconnected short stories. The stories meander through the life of the town, jumping from one Bakerton family to another, overlapping here an there. Bakerton's halcyon beginnings are the backdrop for the first story, one about Jewish and Polish immigrants. In the penultimate story of this collection, the Bakerton Borough Council tries to force a descendant of the Baker Family to clean up their property, which borders land that the council hopes to lease to a correctional facility. Through a large cast of characters, whose last names become familiar by the end of the book, Haigh portrays the decline--but not the death--of a coal town. These are uniquely American stories.

Haigh is quick with a funny or poignant turn of phrase. One of my favorites came from "Favorite Son," a story about a former high school football star who has fallen on hard times. The story beings, "For a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison. For another kind, it is a stage." Haigh is an excellent storyteller, at once adept at ensconcing her readers in her often uncharitable fictional town and at conveying the humanity of her characters. News from Heaven is at times a little somber, but that's to be expected from a collection of stories about the economic decline of a coal mining town. I very much enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading other works by Haigh.