Roadframes: The American Highway Narrative

Though not for the ""general audience"" touted in the Preface (sentences such as ""[Heat-Moon] conflates the decimation of the Plains Indians and the subsequent obliteration of regional folkways by commercial icons and specialized labor"" limit the readership), Lackey's ""extended meditation on the shadow texts of American road books written between 1903 and 1994"" is an unusually lively, astute and persuasive work. Lackey, an English professor at the University of New Orleans, draws from standards such as On the Road and Grapes of Wrath to forgotten pulp novels such as Thomas and Agnes Wilby's On the Trail to Sunset. Most notably, he devotes one of his five chapters to an exploration of African American road works, showing a difference between white travelers, who can escape their old selves while on the road, and black ones, who cannot. In his other chapters, Lackey addresses psychological differences between train and car travel, ""highway consciousness,"" the Transcendentalist roots of many road books and seven novels he calls ""romances of the road."" Lackey's orientation is latter-day Marxist or ""new historicist,"" with women's perspectives given surprisingly short shrift. Further, for all his invocation of Thoreau and Emerson as patron saints of the genre, Lackey skips over a troubling contradiction in their work: while both advocated spiritual travel, they also distrusted literal, physical travel, Emerson calling it a ""fool's paradise"" in his essay ""Self-Reliance."" Lackey might have focused more on finding the line between the metaphorical and the literal ""road."" (Sept.)