Road Trip Thoughts
...especially about a potential Great American Novel of the future.
Recently, my family (Canadians) made a small trek across America, the route being vaguely thus: Ontario → Minnesota → Kansas (small stop in Iowa on the way) → Texas → New Mexico → Texas: The Return → Oklahoma → Back through Kansas on up. I don’t want to turn this into a travelogue, as I’m already making a departure from my fictionposting for this mini loveletter/plead to my American audience (which is the majority of yous.) Suffice it to say:
Welcome to Texas, Now You’re A Felon!
HIT BY A TRUCK? CALL [LAWYER]
and other such roadside attractions are what makes trips like that extremely worth it. I, for one, am a huge fan of the extreme absurdities of American culture. Your Best Buys feature indoor, locally painted civic pride murals, and your highways are sometimes adopted by Hells Angels chapters, in between church groups. (The HA sections were the cleanest. It is very important to motorcycle enthusiasts to have a tidy road! Support your local 81 for nice highways.)
America is a nation of big-titty blonde prom queen cheerleaders bursting with pride, and large paved lots full of themed wares. That grand absurdness in American culture, as an outsider, fills me with glee every time I visit. (I mean, Canadian, as a type, isn’t pure outsider—we are your closest neighbours, virtually indistinguishable at first glance, which is how our comedians easily integrate into your society—and yet we are a different breed, but I digress.)
Spatula City is the perfect satire of your beautiful country that could ever be written. All the best satires, after all, are written out of love. Otherwise, it just comes across as soulless and bitter laughing-at, not laughing-with.
Now we come to my main reason for writing this: If one wanted to write the next Great American Novel (hereafter referred to as GAN), abandon insincerity. Embrace the absurd if you want to go with that angle, but above all else: be unabashedly true. American culture is unique and unlike any other flavour of cultural absurdity on a global scale and I mean that in the most endearing way.
Depressing naysayers want you to believe “It's impossible to write a GAN nowadays.” Untrue. This is the attitude that makes Europeans, Japanese, and Canadians better at writing American Stories than Americans themselves, lately. Maybe there’s something in the water supply that makes you feel severed from your roots, which is a vital thing if you’re going to write about the branches. (This is a tree analogy. Remember: the roots of a tree can be just as large, numerous and twisted as the branches you see, but it’s all beneath the soil. Ok, kids? You get it.)
Tell those doomers to take a hike/suck eggs/fly kites.
There are sections of the Santa Fe Trail where you can still see the wagon wheel ruts. Consider them your Roman Empire, as a thought experiment. Obsessively consider those wheel ruts. The bravery of facing death by dysentery, the yearning to plant your flag, the thrill of naming a place Pie Town because you’re a Goddamn American and You Can.
Us outsiders—the ones some cheerless losers love hating on if we say we like American culture because they are projecting their own self-hate, or jealousy, depending—want to continue to love your culture like we always have. There’s a reason American denim was a really big deal in the former USSR, and still is in Japan, Indonesia, etc. In “Civilization(tm)” terms, America won a massive culture victory, and what you’ve done with it is allow those same miserable jerks to peel your bark, starve your branches, so you can be just as miserable as they are, like a narcissist mother making you hate your dad, and in the process you’ve given the entire globe Paris Syndrome.
(I suppose this is a good spot for this small aside: My 10yo is obsessed with the idea of The Cowboy. He wears a cowboy hat everywhere he goes, and boots. We watch cowboy movies, he reads Louis L’Amour. He rides horses. I think he was pretty disappointed at the lack of IRL cowboys on the trip—YOU try explaining this reality to a 10yo!! But the Cowboy Museum in OKC was great for him, very healing. Anyway, carrying on.)
As we drove sections of Route 66 it was clear to me those modern vestiges of wagon wheel ruts, the original small towns that spread the roots pre-interstate, were left to choose one of two options: One, as if the old highway was a river that dried up, the people have left the town to rot; or two, like the little restaurants in Tucumcari NM or Shamrock TX, stubbornly remain to cater to the mostly foreign tourists who yearn to experience that fragile Americana. Our own Northwestern Ontario accent was heard amongst French, British, New Zealand and German, with a couple locals looking for a bite to eat from one of the last surviving restaurants of their tiny towns. A couple employees were Eastern European. Perhaps it was because we were there on the off-season—late October probably sees less traffic vs the height of summer—but it still felt like the broader Americana decided sincerity was too kitsch and embarrassing.
Why are you so embarrassed about things that makes the globe love you? I think this is a real contribution to the lack of sincerity in all media right now: those wagon wheel ruts weren't planted there by the shy, not by the timid. “Please don’t make fun of me.” What are you, Canadian?
Be the American the Japanese think you are is the most honest motivational message to come out of meme culture.
Let me phrase this another way.
Cormac McCarthy understood the roots of American culture. Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, William Faulkner, Mark Twain. Thomas Pynchon, in his postmodern maximalist way, understood the roots of what he was writing about. Observe the people around you. Study your history: the town you were born or, if you weren’t born in the USA, the town that adopted you/where you now call home, the places you’ve been—going off the interstate in Kansas we drove by the site of the Battle of Black Jack, which I had never heard of, and there’s about 30000 historical markers along every highway, how many have you stopped at to read?—America is a unique place BECAUSE it looks inward. Even your whores snd tweakers are a different breed.
Take a look at Canadian lit, we’re too obsessed with middle-class complacency and where we came from globally so it takes up too much of our collective cranium, and there has never been a Great Canadian Novel.
Every state has it’s own culture that can only be appreciated offline, and this is a big mistake a lot of authors are making, especially the young. (Where are the great Gen Z authors? I dunno, probably hoping to write a video game because “no one reads.” Another doomer statement.) A novel cannot be written if you haven’t tried to experience life screenlessly, unless the novel is about experiencing life through screens. Kids: this isn’t just an old woman yelling at clouds. Nothing online is real.
Like I stated above, there’s virtually no such thing as a Great Canadian Novel in the Anglo-Canadian lit sphere. Aside from maybe Robertson Davies or what’s-her-face, we study GANs in school, or British classics —despite the huge differences in microcultures from coast to coast there is an Americanness that is unlike anything else, and I'll say it again: only miserable, terminally online rejects want to hate on it, whether or not they can identify what exactly it is they’re hating (because they’ve never gone outside to experience it)—and some of them happen to be well-connected enough to make a living off of making the rest of America feel bad about the things that make them special. Obviously, every country has distinct culture—Germans have German culture, etc etc—but when they emigrate to the US, they become American. Another branch on the big imaginary tree I keep referencing, but American nonetheless. Canadian immigrant culture is so vastly different I can't even go into it satisfyingly in a small wordcount.
By the way, just to clarify: critique doesn’t equal hate (in the same way unthinking patriotism isn’t always honest.) Critique is healthy. Proper critique of American culture (because OF COURSE there are problems, and the best way to explore those problems is via the novel) is done out of love: see my statement on satire, it’s in the same vein. But, being a contrarian asshole or a hater for the sake of destruction is not a healthy attitude, at all, and it’s obvious to your audience which angle you’re coming from, even if you think you’re being clever. A GAN doesn’t have to be happy, or even optimistic, but it must be honest, and it must come from love, or the need for love, as if the author is a child of divorce and the novel is their therapist.
When my family visited The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in OKC, my son asked “Why aren’t there any Western movies from Canada?” (Alberta, as an example, has strong rodeo culture and stuff like that. Texas North, etc) and I answered: Well, firstly, there is such a thing as “Northerns,” usually based in Western Canada (which is North to the American audience) with Mounty protagonists (as riffed on by characters like Dudley Do-Right or the Ren and Stimpy skit Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen), or as an alternate to the Mounty narrative, stuff like the poetry of Robert Service about the Yukon Gold Rush (my personal favourite being The Cremation of Sam McGee.) Secondly, we export all our talent to write for American audiences. Simple as. (Not a Western but a supreme example of this is Wayne’s World: greatest Canadian movie ever made, set in Chicago instead of the original Toronto, and the characters changed to Americans.)
One of my favourite recent Westerns, and to be honest one of my favourite novels, period, is the Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, a Canadian. It was adapted by a French director, and although the casting is absolutely perfect (it was John C. Reilly himself that read it and got it greenlit, it was His Role for sure) the adaptation misses a lot of the spirit of the book but of course it does, because that’s a tale as old as film adaptations of novels. Read the book. It’s so fucking funny.
The Western itself, as a genre of films, books, etc, was insanely popular, not just in America but it was one of the main contributors to the 20th century American cultural dominance globally, but when Hollywood saw that the Europeans—notably the Italians—were doing Westerns better than the Americans, and tag-teaming with the Japanese (Samurai films being cinematically inspired by the Western and linked by remakes both ways) they became so embarrassed that they manufactured the decline in interest on their home turf. (This isn’t only my opinion, but as I’m not writing a wikipedia article and I don’t remember my sources: trust me, bro.)
That’s really it—the reason Gen X, Millennials and beyond think cowboy flicks are corny is because Hollywood execs told them they were, not because there were “too many cowboy movies.” All those writers that are shitting up movies with quips and killing sincerity are the ones who were raised in the aftermath of the “cowboy movies are corny, and by extension so is Americana” smear campaign era.
Of course, this is blamed on postmodernism, but considering some of the best westerns are works of postmodernism/revisionist (see: the Dollars trilogy), I don’t believe that to be the case. Postmodernism is a style, just like Romanticism or Realism.
Also: I’m not here to blame any one political pursuation. You’re fully capable of blaming whoever you want, if that makes you happy. And I especially don't believe that any novel no matter the subject will benefit from pushing politics so I highly recommend avoiding that. The common experience of a nation transcends politics. It’s a diversion. It's nauseating, purposeless division—unless you’re writing a book about a politician, the next GAN should be bereft of inserted politics (imho). Unfortunately, too many terminally online authors only see the hot takes by other politically-rotted brains and that skews the perception of what is actually real in their life that they could write about instead. (Unless (again) the book is a satire or critique of it all: buuuut there’s a difference between insertion and examination. You understand what I’m getting at, I have faith you can decipher my rants and raves.)
I’m pleading with you now, Americans, go out there and visit the little towns abandoned by interstates, read some historical marker plaques. Your writing will benefit from it. (The same goes for Canadians and everyone else!) Your audience may be smaller now than it once was, but art is more than the audience size.
Be sure to leave your wheel ruts for the curious to find. The world needs it.
Thanks for reading. I don’t normally write stuff like this, but after 2 weeks of almost nonstop driving in the US this is something I thought about a lot.
For those who are new, I generally post fiction. Why not check out my books?
Pallas, a science fiction novel
The Highwayman Kennedy Thornwick, a literary fantasy
Free on Substack is a back catalogue of short stories and poetry, and a completed fantasy serial: Pull Me Under
(If anyone is curious about the zine, I’m veeerrryyy behind and I’m sorry about that, but I still have plans for it so don’t fret!)
Cheers, and do some writing!
It wouldn't get published these days.
But, maybe self-publication and self-marketing is the American way to do it. ;)
My favorite series growing up, was Kung-Fu. David Caridine played a chinaman who journeyed through the American West, kicking arse with his Kung-Fu.
How much more Western can you get?