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Reviewed by:
  • Travels with Casey by Benoit Denizet-Lewis
  • Tom Barden (bio)
Travels with Casey
by Benoit Denizet-Lewis
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 341 pages. Cloth, $26.00

Books inspired by Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley have become something of a trend recently. There was Gregory Ziegler’s Travels with Max in 2009, Bill Barich’s Long Way Home in 2010, Bill Steigerwald’s Dogging Steinbeck in 2012, and now, the latest entry in this sub-genre, Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s 2014 Travels with Casey. Each writer found a distinct slant to bring to the work. Ziegler went for humorous and chatty. Barich, a terrific prose stylist, wrote insightful cultural commentary. Steigerwald set out to expose Steinbeck as a fraud who made things up. And Denizet-Lewis chose to focus squarely on the dog angle.

His book resembles Travels with Charley in several ways. Most obviously, the map in the inside covers mirrors the one in the 1960 Viking hardback edition of Steinbeck’s book. Also, like Steinbeck’s, Denizet-Lewis’s vehicle has a fancy European name, “the Chalet.” His canine companion, a Labrador mix named Casey, while not a poodle, does resemble Charley in size and disposition. And his stated mission, like Steinbeck’s, is to discover the current state of American society.

But distinct differences are there from the outset. For one thing, Denizet-Lewis is an openly gay bachelor, which adds a socio-cultural dimension to the book that Steinbeck did not explore. And a personal one. A romantic sub-plot develops when a medical student named Marc rides with him for a while and then flies to join him at various sites on his journey. Also, Denizet-Lewis’s narrative voice could hardly be less “Steinbeckian.” He opens with a long prologue about a session with his psychoanalyst where the topic is his concern that Casey does not like him very much. This emphasis on his neuroses makes him feel more like a Woody Allen character than the self-assured narrator of Travels with Charley.

Also, from the first scenes in New York City, the people he depicts are substantially weirder than Steinbeck’s folks. At times the book feels like reality television. We hear about serious on-going feuds among rival factions at a New York City dog park. We meet an English speaking couple whose dog only understands Spanish. “He was a rescue,” they explain. We spend time with gay ranchers in Colorado who herd cattle with border collies. And we get to know two homeless teenagers named Dakota and Blueberry who shower love on their puppies to make up for their own sad and loveless situation—both having parents who are meth addicts, what they call “tweakers.” [End Page 94]

Denizet-Lewis is a lively writer. He really knows how to entertain. He is often hilarious, always good company, and delightfully knowledgeable about dog-related arcana. He relates a steady stream of scientific information on such topics as “Black Dog Syndrome” (the idea that darker coated dogs are less often chosen for adoption), scent receptor cell numbers in human noses versus canines (5 million and 225 million, respectively), and cutting edge “canine cognition studies results.” He keeps a solid pace throughout, covering thousands of miles and what seems like hundreds of individuals without allowing the places or people to lose their uniqueness.

For me, the question that lingered after reading Travels with Casey was whether all of Denizet-Lewis’s traveling, interviewing, and commenting amounted to anything beyond a fun read with good anecdotes from a good storyteller? Was his decision to focus on a single sub-culture—dog-obsessed Americans—a mistake? Did he discover the state of American society? Actually, I think he did. There is no grand theory of American culture here, no “big picture,” of the sort that Steinbeck sought in Travels with Charley. But that is not surprising given that such a monolithic culture hardly exists in the twenty-first century.

Travels with Charley ended with a depiction of “the cheerleaders,” a group of mean-spirited segregationist women in New Orleans who gathered daily to taunt a little African-American girl as she walked to her...

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