Turn to the North for road trip read
Sometimes you just have to leave all the bad luck and existential angst behind, grab your kids and fly to Alaska in late summer. America’s last frontier is the best place to rent an aging RV and navigate your mid-life crisis.
Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; his new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is thorough, detail-driven and well-paced.
The story follows the adventures of Josie, 38, a broken and paranoid protagonist, and her two kids, Paul, 8, and Ana, 5, a precocious preemie, “going to the mattresses” in Alaska like bank robbers during the Depression.
White wine is Josie’s go-to drug: “Josie didn’t want to see their eyes or puckered mouths when they heard her order a third chardonnay at three p.m. on a Monday.”
Josie had a successful dental practice back in smalltown Ohio. But a crushing “gross negligence” lawsuit by an elderly patient meant Josie lost almost everything.
Josie’s inept and neurotic ex-partner, Carl, is the stumbling scion of “a land baron who raped a thousand miles of Costa Rican forest to feed his cows.” Carl fathered her two children but wasn’t a reliable breadwinner.
Now she’s fled from Carl to rural Alaska, with only a velvet bag of cash and no credit card or cellphone to trace her and their rambunctious kids.
After flying in and renting a thirty-year-old RV (“The Chateau”) from a retired couple, Josie sets out to see a bit of the 49th state with her young kids. Her RV heroes’ journey bumps into a motley crew of native Alaskans and tourists while she tries to keep ahead of the late summer forest fires, which force her north (strangely without a summer midnight sun as an antagonist).
Eggers, the omniscient narrator, takes the reader both inside Josie’s head and outside into this unfamiliar landscape.
He aptly depicts Josie’s growing bond with her kids and her search for redemption.
Eggers stuffs well-drawn characters, believable scenes and topical social commentary into the novel like an overpacked suitcase.
Yet it all seems to work in under 400 pages.
Read Heroes of the Frontier. It’s an engaging, picaresque adventure with contemporary themes. D. Grant Black is a Saskatchewan travel journalist who loves a good road trip without GPS.