Tim O’Brien lights a Carlton, takes a drag, and says he’s going to quit smoking. With his next breath he says, speaking via Zoom from his home in Austin, Tex., that America Fantastica is his last book. Granted, he said the same thing about 2019’s Dad’s Maybe Book in the War & Peace of Tim O’Brien documentary, an intimate look at the 76-year-old writer and his wife as they raise two sons, born when O’Brien was 58 and 60, respectively. But this time he means it.

“I had a kind of perverse fun writing it,” he says. “But making sentences that are reasonably graceful and connect to one another is hard work. I feel now that I owe myself a road trip.”

A road trip drives America Fantastica (HarperCollins, Oct.). But it’s more Mad Max than National Lampoon’s Vacation. O’Brien, who is arguably still best known for his bestselling 1990 story collection The Things They Carried, sees the journey as a “moral tug-of-war.” It begins in 2019 with a bank robbery and a Buick LeSabre, and ends one year and several bodies later in a Ferrari Superfast. Odometers spin some 7,000 miles, from fictional Fulda (which O’Brien puts in Shasta County, Calif., notorious for extreme anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers) to real Bemidji (in O’Brien’s home state of Minnesota) and back, with many points in between.

“The road trip is one of the American fantasies,” he says. “Millions of people think everything’s gonna be better when you’re in your RV, forgetting squabbling with your wife, and your kids yelling in back, and the lines at Yellowstone are 20 miles long and the grizzly bears eat your dinner.”

The man at the wheel is a former husband, father, journalist, and JC Penny employee, and a current alcoholic, who calls himself Boyd Halverson. He kidnaps bank teller Angie Bing, a young born-again motormouth with a savior complex and an amusingly unabashed libido. They hide out in Mexico, but the robbery isn’t reported, revealing greater crimes. The story could end there if Angie didn’t share their whereabouts with her fiancé, Randy Zapf, a guy with a “Charles Manson fantasy,” in O’Brien’s words.

Randy is bad enough, but assorted others give chase: corrupt bankers, billionaires, cops, election deniers, an inept private eye, Boyd’s empathetic ex, an ethically challenged fitness trainer, a suicidal drifter, and a sadistic schizophrenic all enter the fray. O’Brien relays the trip with a zany, gonzo style. Things can get madcap, even ridiculous, but a steady drip of dread keeps the rubber on the road, and through it all beats the big bleeding heart of Angie, who refuses to give up on her kidnapper.

At the start of the novel, a “lying infection” has taken hold, O’Brien writes. Boyd himself is radically mendacious, a former member of the Fulda Truth Teller Source Seed (one of 76 nationwide), collectively flooding cyberspace with “fresh untrue truth content,” with the goal of finding a larger audience on Fox News. (Incidentally, Fox is owned, along with O’Brien’s publisher, by Rupert Murdoch, who is admired in the book by a corrupt, coked-up billionaire; O’Brien says, “I wanted to strike back at him. I’m proud to bite the hands that feed me.”)

Some of the “perverse fun” O’Brien mentioned came from creating conspiracies crazier than those already online. “Reptiles man the phone banks at the IRS,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t invent that. That’s out there.” Though he did invent this: 12 American presidents, including Lincoln and JFK, did not actually exist. “This satire is not totally fabulist; it’s anchored in real, ludicrous stuff.”

Behind the successful conspiracy is a kernel of truth, and behind the believer is a grievance. O’Brien has never turned away from ugly truths. In this, his final novel, he stares into the eyes of his liars to locate the private pain in their hearts. With delicate agility, he considers what might make a person cling to fantasy. In Boyd’s words, his motivation for the bank job was “pure fantasy,” as ridiculous as iguanas scanning tax returns. “A rewind button” is what he wanted—a return to a “version of Hollywood happiness, circa 1953.” In O’Brien’s words, it was “a yearning for an America that never was.”

In the Lake of the Woods, The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and now America Fantastica are all, O’Brien says, “about fantasy. And we need fantasy. It keeps us going, happily ever after.” Fantasizing about what he would do after combat kept him going in Vietnam, he recalls. He imagined checking into a hotel and cranking the AC. Attached to the ceiling would be two kegs, ice cold Coca-Cola and beer, long straws dangling down to the bed. When he got home, he did check into a hotel, but the AC wasn’t nearly as cold as he’d imagined in his foxhole in M˜y Lai.

Soon after that, O’Brien went to Harvard to study government, then took a reporting job at the Washington Post and wrote his first book, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). Five years later, Cacciato won the National Book Award; Carried (1990) has sold approximately six million copies worldwide, according to HarperCollins.

“That tension between fantasy and reality isn’t imposed on my book,” O’Brien says. “It comes from my life.” This is a point he wants to emphasize: “Nonwriters don’t understand that a writer’s concepts come from the moral quandaries that we endure in our lives.”

Another point O’Brien wants to make: America Fantastica is by design full of “old stuff,” he says, like that LeSabre, and all the mentions of Gunsmoke. “2019, 2020 didn’t pop out of a vacuum,” he adds, leaning in. “If you want to make America great again, what do you go back to? The ’50s? McCarthyism and racism rampant and huge income disparities? World War II, people getting slaughtered the world over? The red scare of the ’20s? The Civil War and the country divided? The genocide of Indians? What do you go back to?”

Back in ’69, when O’Brien got drafted, he considered dodging. The Things They Carried includes a story of a draft dodger named Tim O’Brien getting as far as the Canadian border before turning back to accept his fate. But the real O’Brien never ran—he went to war and came home angry.

He’s still mad today. His sleep is troubled. In dreams he gets lost in the dark in a war zone. “Where are my friends?” he says. “Where’s my platoon? It sounds made up, too close to the morally lost feeling I had in Vietnam. What am I doing here? How can my legs keep moving through this fucking nightmare? How can I even sleep, at all, ever?”

Asked if he believes he’s paid a high price for always telling the truth, he thinks before nodding. “But I feel it was a necessary price,” he says. “I should be paying a price. It’s not nearly as heavy as the price a lot of my friends paid, lost legs and death. I don’t feel self-pity.” He stubs out one Carlton and lights another. “I feel I owed it to my conscience and the world to strike back at this man-killing-man thing that’s gone on for centuries. But it’s a voice that won’t triumph. I’ve lost the optimism I had 30, 40 years ago; the ’60s were full of optimism. The music, the politics. That’s pretty much gone now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still cry out against the crime of war, of sanctioned homicide.”

O’Brien has run out of cigarettes. Before we say goodbye, he tells me, with a shrug, that he thought of himself, when writing America Fantastica, as “Jonathan Swift come back.” He adds, “Sometimes laughing at evil is the best revenge.” Even if the laugh catches in the throat.

Mike Harvkey is the author of In the Course of Human Events and was the researcher/reporter for the bestselling true crime book All-American Murder.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of the character Boyd Halverson.