Freeways : A Journey West on Route 66 - hardcover

And so begins Lewis Davies's trek across America from his David Lynch-like room in a small motel in Tulsa. Inspired by the popular culture of the west and the novels of Steinbeck and Kerouac, Welsh novelist Davies (Trees of Crows and Work, Sex, and Rugby) decided to take a look for himself. One summer, using Rt. 66 and the trail taken by the Okies during the 1930s as his map, he makes his way west. His winding road narrative captures the faces, voices, and lives of people who live and work in the restaurants, gas stations, stores, and theme parks along this once-vibrant, now tired, almost desolate route.<P>From the traumas of a foreigner buying a used car in Tulsa, the strange sameness of unending motels and diners, a rattlesnake museum in Texas, D. H. Lawrence's ranch in Taos, meeting an odd Australian hitch-hiker and the disappointment of bumping into her boyfriend days later, to the glitz of Las Vegas and, finally, the farms of Salinas, this is an other-worldly story of people constantly on the move in a country where (so unlike his own), the Welshman decides no one seems to be settled or grounded. With its mixture of geography, history, anecdote, and lively personal encounters, Freeways breathes fresh interest into what has become a well-worn journey.