A couple of weeks ago I received an email from someone at The Steinbeck Review expressing interest in reviewing The Joys of Travel. I slipped a paperback copy into a padded envelope and drove it to the post office.
A few days later an email appeared telling me that the book had arrived and asking if it contained any Steinbeck references. (Odd time to ask, I thought.) I wrote back that the chapter on Movement includes a mention of Travels with Charley with, I added to prepare him, “a slight, joking dig at the author.” I didn’t say that I list the four great American road books – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – and note that Kerouac’s approach is sometimes described as novelistic but it was Steinbeck who made up many of the encounters that he wrote about. (This was discovered a number of years ago by a journalist who had innocently set off to trace the great writer’s route.) “As someone who finds Travels with Charley depressingly short on dialogue,” I write in the book, “I almost wish he had fabricated more.”
Yesterday I got an email informing me that my book would not be reviewed because it doesn’t contain enough about Steinbeck.
