The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo is a good but ultimately disappointing read. Based on the premise, and because my wife and I met one of the characters he describes, I thought it would be a fun, interesting read. Caputo’s dry sense of humor, his wife and dogs, his desire to set dubious goals and achieve them, carried me through to the end.
However, his initial premise to ask people what holds us together as a nation, while at first helps drive the narrative, seems to almost disappear by the end. (His pertinent 2013 question has become even more important by 2022.) Caputo never builds to any sort of satisfactory answer or resolution or acknowledgement and ends with almost a shrug, a recording of all the miles driven.
What we’re left with is a travelogue. That in itself isn’t so bad, but for me, having been to most of the places he writes about and talked to the locals as he has, it was nothing new, and didn’t deliver any fresh perspective. His journey had all sorts of opportunities for adventure, but none seemed to have occurred. The most gripping story was one that did not happen on the trip, a recollection of his son almost drowning. Also, at least one of his facts is not accurate (and I suspect a few others are a little off). For example, in the Missouri Ozarks, the Huzzah does not flow into the Courtois; it’s the other way around. I know the area well.
Caputo clearly is a very good writer. Maybe I will at some point read his Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War. Right now however, this travelogue doesn’t motivate me to read his other work.
