Is there such thing as an American soul? And are you ready to find it tucked away in corners of the country you've never seen?
If your answer is "Yes!" pick up Robert Wolf's latest book, In Search of America. Open it up and you'll find yourself breathing in the dust of empty boxcars, sticking out your thumb for rides down open highways, planting one foot in front of another as you discover artist's colonies, skating along the upper crust suburb of New Canaan Connecticut to see if the rich really are different and learning life's lessons in New York City.
What happens in this book is that Wolf tells a story of a place, a time, and a person. You turn a corner and he does it again. So you are drawn even deeper into the journey. Whether it's in Santa Fe or San Francisco or a barren stretch of Route 66, you keep getting drawn into the journey.
This is a book you don't rush through. Instead, you savor. You realize as this journey begins to unfold that you are in the hands of a writer who will be with you every step of the way--he'll make sure you see what needs to be seen. So you slow down. Wolf isn't writing third hand about something he read on the Internet. Wolf was in that dusty bar playing dominoes with those old men with beer guts who, like the lyrics of the classic Guy Clark song "Desperadoes Waiting For a Train," were telling lies while they played.
Underlying this epic journey is the credibility Wolf brings to the story. He's lived in more states, had more jobs, and could tell you about more towns and cities than, most likely, anyone you know. One of those jobs was journalist for a big city daily. So reporting the facts is always in play. But Wolf is a reporter with a soul. Whether he's painting pictures with his words that tell you about life as a ranch hand or a college instructor, his stories come through with a lyricism that you can see, hear, smell and taste. So much so, that if anybody ever figures out that this book should be a movie, it will be a movie you want to see. The scene where Wolf and a pal wander drunk through the streets of Juarez looking for dynamite to blow up a hotel will alone be worth the price of a ticket.
Wolf's search for America centers on finding "vanishing breeds" like the cowboy we meet as at the very beginning. Standing in the Post Office of the tiny town, somewhat self-consciously dressed like a cowboy, wanting very much to be a cowboy. Even though, as Wolf tells us, "Most cowboys do day work--a day here and a day there."
Through Wolf and his cast of characters, we learn regional cultures and somehow touch moments of the American soul that we simply won't find anywhere else.
Focusing on pockets of the country relatively untouched by modernization, as he recounts his own coming of age through the 1960's; what makes Wolf's story our story too is that from the very first page of the book, it is abundantly clear that we are in the hands of a master storyteller. When he puts you "on a clear stretch of Iowa highway surrounded by hay fields," you can almost smell the hot rubber rhythm of the tires on the pavement. When psychotic danger in the form of a crazed hobo jumps up into the boxcar joining a young Wolf, huddled in the corner you're scared too. When the fight starts up in the Santa Fe bar, you feel the punch. And when he rumbles across the southwest in that boxcar, so do you. In the rich full tapestry of the marginalized stitched together by Wolf, the spirits of Carl Sandburg and James T. Farrell are never far.
Finally, we get from this book the answer to the age-old question, "Can a fun book also be an important book?" And the answer is a resounding "Yes!"
Just beneath the fun of the journey are some very serious questions that speak directly to the tenor of a United States of America still trying to make its way and do what's right in the midst of such tough times for so very many.
The first question is. "Who are we?" Sounds simple, but it's not. Because amidst what's marketed, branded or idealized across the American psyche, there is also the marginalized, the dying towns where the factory closed down or the city neighborhood where there are no jobs.
Secondly, "How are we connected?" Again and again through the book, Wolf will introduce us to someone who then introduces us to someone else and on and on till we're all living in an artist's colony together.
Third, perhaps the most important question of all. In these times of income disparity, fears of class warfare, partisan gridlock and the slow death of compromise where a person is either "in the club or not in the club" and nothing they can do will change that fact, Wolf's fine new work prompts the question, "How do we practice community in a way that makes us all stronger?" To learn from the marginalized and then give back?
In Search of America will prompt the hard questions.
But along the way, you'll have a whole lot of fun.
I