Eight Books to Take With You on a Road Trip
On a long, meandering road trip—especially one with no particular destination or strict timeline for arrival—something hypnotic happens. You become attuned to the voices on the radio, the strange grammar of the signs, and the variations in the unfamiliar landscape in ways you never do during more conventional travel. I’d posit that it has something to do with being in constant motion and freed of immediate obligation. The mode of transport is important too: Airplanes move too fast and fly too high, and travel on foot is too slow and too low to the ground. Cars, trains, and buses make the topography change at a speed the mind comprehends.
I’ve personally driven more than 10,000 miles around the United States in a pickup truck that was also my temporary house, and I’ve always loved stories set on the highway. But I didn’t understand why until I wrote my forthcoming novel, Housemates, about two queer women trying to find themselves as artists and driving across Pennsylvania to receive a dubious inheritance. A moving vehicle pressurizes every thought, feeling, and interaction, prompting unique confessions and realizations. The eight books below show that road-trip stories are fundamentally about those unstable, generative, surprising reactions that arise as an ordinary character drives into the unknown.
The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith
People tend to think of Highsmith’s classic as a lesbian romance rather than a road novel, but it’s both: The second half of the book takes place in a car, as the protagonist, Therese, decides to go with her crush, Carol, on a trip west during those peculiar, formless weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. Sharing motel rooms with two twin beds in anonymous small towns, the women can finally act on their mutual attraction. Therese discovers that she likes being Carol’s passenger, as it allows her to train her gaze, and her camera, on Carol and the American vistas, seeking a new kind of understanding. Carol, freed from the imprisonment of her suburban town and her husband, is finally able to lean into her sexual power, turning her probing curiosity to Therese. Only in this remote, liberated setting can the pair see each other clearly enough to recognize that they are in love—and yet they’re being followed by a mysterious car and an overly friendly man. Their romance pushes the novel to its difficult, but surprisingly sweet, conclusion.
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie
When Maria’s girlfriend, Steph, drops shocking news about their relationship over brunch, Maria’s dull reaction is to line up five beans in a row on her fork and eat them. She’s a literary-minded trans woman who works at a New York City bookstore and is tired of teaching people about being trans; she’s also deeply dissociated from her body. The breakup is the catalyst for Maria to change her life, which she kicks off by stealing Steph’s car and heading west. She ends up in Nevada, where she meets and becomes intensely fixated on a stoner Walmart employee named James, who she believes is a closeted trans person needing to be taken under her wing. A predictable story about a stuck character would end with that character reaching a state of un-stuck-ness, but that isn’t what Binnie chooses here. Maria is not exceptional, and her role isn’t to be a perfect trans role model; instead, she remains real and confused and continually searching, like all heroines.
Read: The cult classic that captures the grind of dead-end jobs
Eat Only When You’re Hungry, by Lindsay Hunter
This funny, devastating novel begins when middle-aged dad Greg rents an RV in West Virginia and drives it along the southeastern coast to find his son, GJ, now missing but last seen in Florida. Hunter’s prose pays much attention to Greg’s aging, fat body as he drives; the reader learns that he was intensely shamed for his size and his hunger in his youth. But repressing every appetite turns out to be painful for Greg and impossible for GJ, an addict whose own desires have eaten him alive. The fruitless search for GJ takes Greg through the forgotten fringes of America—parking lots, gas stations, motels, highways—and offers intense images and interactions that prompt Greg to examine his memories of his childhood, and his actions as a husband and father. The RV’s journey along this lush and troubled southern scenery mirrors Greg’s journey to recognizing his complicity in GJ’s addiction; each mile reinforces that he has only inflicted on his son the harm that was done to him.
Love Is an Ex-country, by Randa Jarrar
In this fragmented memoir that stitches together Jarrar’s many excursions through America and beyond in her 30s, the writer doesn’t so much drive as saunter across the country—sashay, roll, meander, and play around in it. She describes such moments as the dangerous airport detention she faced when denied entrance to her family’s native Palestine and the time she schooled a racist long-haul trucker in a rest-stop bathroom; in each retelling, she puts her body and her electric mind, with all its insight gleaned from her many identities—queer, Muslim, Palestinian American, fat, femme—in the driver’s seat. Her travels prompt her to examine how people of color are excluded in cultural emblems like kitschy road signs, or how dolls serve as the earliest receptacles of little girls’ rage. The book deploys discrete paragraphs, set off by double-spaced breaks, that defy chronology and evade cause and effect in a deadpan, deceptively simple tone that asks the reader to think about the land itself—whose we are on, and why and how our nation came to be.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli
This novel is about the Great American Road Trip story more than it neatly fits into the genre. A husband and wife, who are both audio documentarians, and their children, a boy and a girl, set off on a cross-country car trip to Arizona. Instead of buying souvenirs and seeing the Grand Canyon, however, the four come across a landscape full of pain and dispossession—“fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides,” Luiselli writes. The story brims with allusions to canonical American road-trip texts such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the poetry of Walt Whitman, and Luiselli breaks up the prose with Polaroids, reports on migrant fatalities, and the reproduced text of a fictional book from within the story, posing the question of whether facts or expressive art forms are the better tool against the violence and forced displacement the characters witness. Nothing is solved, and the travel itself seems to break the foursome apart more than unify them, but much is revealed about what it means to make a family—and a nation—along the way.
Read: The death of the pioneer myth
The Sunset Route, by Carrot Quinn
Quinn’s road is not highways but train lines. Raised in poverty in Alaska by a mother with schizophrenia, the author writes with precision about leaving home at 14 and ending up in Portland, Oregon. There, Quinn dumpster dives for food, finds chosen family among queer punks and straight-edge anarchist communities, learns about gender outside the binary, and discovers that semi-legally riding on freight trains is a means of pleasure, movement, and escape. The Sunset Route alternates between timelines: In one, Quinn is a queer adult train-hopping and, later, long-distance hiking in the Pacific Northwest, where they meet people who are also living on the fringes of America without a safety net. In the other, they recall memories of their childhood, characterized by abuse and anorexia. Ultimately, their writing offers a precise accounting of how their awe for the natural world became their most honest and reliable method to heal.
Cruddy, by Lynda Barry
This title is not for the faint of heart; both its central father-daughter relationship and the road trip on which the pair embark radiate a deep horror. The narrator, Roberta, who refers to her parent only as “the father” throughout, opens her story with a chilling summary: “According to the newspaper version of the story, the father stole me, kidnapped me, snatched me up in the middle of the night,” Barry writes. “The father drove through the darkness. He drove and he drove.” Where Roberta and the father go on their terrifying journey or how long they are gone are never clear—the reader knows only that they’re both subject to his whims. Roberta loves and fears the violent, mentally ill man at the wheel, and the farther they drive, the clearer it becomes that in order to survive the expedition, she must love herself more than she wants to save him from his demons. Their voyage begets isolation and vulnerability, and Barry uses it to explore what happens when the person who is supposed to protect you turns out to be the biggest threat of all.
Read: My God, this is a magical country
Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, by Richard Mirabella
The pivotal car travel takes up a paltry section here, but it is impossible to look away from. Brother & Sister Enter the Forest follows two siblings as they try to find their way through a haze of trauma and estrangement. Justin is unhoused, dealing with PTSD and the physical effects of a traumatic brain injury; Willa is a nurse who makes dioramas of her and Justin’s childhood. When Justin shows up at Willa’s door asking to move in, the narration turns its gaze backwards to the events that broke them apart—a road trip that Justin took with a violent ex-boyfriend in the aftermath of a terrible crime. The trek is the book’s dark, truthful center, casting a shadow of gay shame and survivor’s guilt that takes Justin and his sister decades to see clearly. Still, even outside of those few crucial pages, the plot is infused with driving, aimless and otherwise. “I love this idea,” the siblings’ mother says to Justin. “Taking someone out in a car. You’re trapped. So we can really have a good talk without you running away like you always do.”