In All That Road Going, A. G. Mojtabai takes the well-worn tradition of the American road novel and makes it new. By choosing a title and an epigraph from Jack Kerouac, she makes the connection with the tradition explicit. But the epigraph from Alfred Corn’s April turns it: “…It’s over. The world wakes up.” And Kerouac’s phrase, “all that road going,” is spoken in Mojtabai’s novel by a downwardly mobile chemist who names it for its oppressive weight, not for the freedom it promises.
The novel is set on a long-haul bus ride in the middle of America – mostly between the Texas Panhandle and St. Louis, leaving passengers mostly in the dark and uncertain whether they are in Oklahoma or Missouri. We come to know that they are in the middle of the middle of a journey in which beginning and end are equally inaccessible: the road goes on forever. The road is what is now Interstate 40 and Interstate 44 – what used to be Route 66, and that locates the novel not on the “underside” of America but in its heart. That the vehicle is a Greyhound bus full of passengers more trapped than footloose turns the familiar image of the road as possibility inside out.
Mojtabai’s work is mostly character driven, and, since her first novel, Mundome, she has been fascinated with possibilities created by their chance collisions – in this case, in the form of a seemingly random collection of characters who have nothing in common but the fact of being trapped “on the road” for an extended bus journey. She moves through conversations that are most often parallel stories rather than real exchanges. (In an earlier work, she spoke of circles of pantomime with impermeable boundaries.) By forcing characters and their stories together in the close space of a bus, Mojtabai pushes boundaries toward a critical mass so every possible opening can be tested. It is this testing of boundaries that drives the action of the novel; and, as we might expect where a critical mass is building, there is an explosion.
We get to know several of the characters pretty well, mostly by eavesdropping on conversations intended to pass the time, but also by catching glimpses of the world through their eyes. Mojtabai gathers all of these characters together with us as a great “cloud of witnesses” to witness the heart of America.
Two phrases leap from the novel: “¿Dondé quieres ir?” and “You can’t get lost in America.” The first, a sign in the Greyhound station, calls to mind the Cheshire Cat’s response to Alice, lost, when she asks him which way she ought to go from here. He says it depends on where you want to get to; and when she says she doesn’t much care, he says it doesn’t much matter, because you’re bound to get somewhere if you just keep going long enough. The second, spoken by the bus driver when he is undeniably lost, calls to mind just how powerful the combination of fear and denial can be – especially in the dark on an unfamiliar road. “Anywhere but here” is the most common answer to the first question. And the driver, lost, simply plunges forward hoping for a sign. The novel ends with “a man weeping in darkness–”
Mojtabai writes compellingly, and she is a master at sketching characters. Drawing characters together in a great cloud of witnesses, she manages here to focus attention on some of the most important questions of our time and place – questions that retain their significance in any time and place where readers find themselves on the way, in the middle, in the dark.
Mojtabai directs her readers’ attention to the heart of America, not asking “what’s the matter with Kansas” (or Amarillo, or Missouri) but reminding us that “this raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge… all that road going…” is America.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
A. G. Mojtabai. All That Road Going. Northwestern University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8101-5200-2