Connoisseur of the Mundane

Detail from cover

For the last fifteen years, my wife and I have taken annual driving trips around America. We log about 10,000 miles in six weeks of being on the road. When we mention these hamburger and cheap motel trips to others, the most common first remark is "I've always wanted to do that!" Most then pause and say, "I probably never will."

Brad Herzog has. To travelers, armchair or actual, his books are emerging from relative literary obscurity to among the new classics of American travel writing.

Here is Herzog in his newest book, after he's crossed the Red River from North Dakota and driven his Winnebago into Minnesota: "It may be my mood, but there seems to be a gray tint to everything I see—the worn road, the fallow fields, the faded hay bales, the bark on the trees, the dirty roofs of barns and farm houses, the mud mounds at construction sites, the telephone poles like a procession of leaning crosses."

It's the "mud mounds at construction sites" that gets me. Generally, travel books are supposed to highlight the glorious and unique.

Not Herzog. Zen-like, he's a connoisseur of the mundane. In his States of Mind (2001), his excuse for driving around America was to search out towns with names like Harmony, Love, Inspiration. In his second book, Small World (2004), he sought out American places whose names echoed world cities like Moscow and Paris. Now in his third, he's on a small quest for the meaning of heroism as he visits America's Troy, Sparta, Pandora, and Ithaca, among other Greek-name-derived destinations.

As he drives from California to a college reunion in Ithaca, New York, the questions Herzog asks are similar to those asked by both Thomas Mann in "Tonio Kroger" and W. Somerset Maugham in The Summing Up (1938). That is, can an observer or recorder rather than a man of action truly be one with life: "There are times when I feel as if I am experiencing life only so that I can present it to others."

Frequently quoting from and alluding to a copy of the Odyssey always on the seat beside him, like others reaching mid-life, Herzog is "trying to place myself—to locate where I am in my life, where I fall on some sort of heroic scale." If one quits sports and becomes a sports writer, as Herzog did, has he failed? Herzog made a decision early in his life: "I don't want to have a comfortable life. I want to have a special life." But now is his life special? Is it futile? His understatement, as he attends a racing meet, is wry and delicious: "So this is where I have come to in my journey—sitting amid a rain of dirt and watching men drive machines in circles."

As he nears Ithaca, Herzog becomes increasingly self-depreciating—a little too much so, I think—but in his worries, he finds identity with others. Looking at the kinds of signs that parade a proprietor's name, he writes, "Who can blame them for putting a part of themselves on the signage of their pride and joy? It is the same reason I don't use a pen name."

Actually, what's best about Herzog's writing is not so much the goal but the search along the way—as it always is in those memorable travel books that rise to the level of literature. I was delighted to find, in the area along the Columbia River that helped produce the first Atomic bomb, Richland High School: "Bombers is its nickname. The school's coat of arms featured an adorable mushroom cloud. You can buy bumper stickers there—still to this day—that declare, PROUD OF THE CLOUD." And this observation as Herzog passes through tourist trap western towns: "A real western town isn't self-aware...