A Good Book Review: Long Way Home by Bill Barich

Long Way Home by Bill Barich

On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America

Inspired by John Steinbeck, one of our most celebrated writers illuminates the heart of America at a moment of historical change.

“We do not take a trip: a trip takes us,” John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley. In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled on a used copy of Travels with Charley in Ireland, where he had lived for the past eight years, and it inspired him to return to the United States and explore the mood of the country as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. With a hotly contested election looming, and in the shadow of an economic meltdown, Barich set off on a 5,943-mile cross-country drive from New York to his old hometown of San Francisco via U.S. Route 50, a road twisting through the American heartland.

Long Way Home is the stunning result of his pilgrimage, a revealing and perceptive portrait of America at a dramatic Point in its history. Where Steinbeck returned from the road depressed about the country’s future prospects, Barich—while not uncritical of our occasional narrow-mindedness and incivility—finds brightness among the dark and rekindles his belief in the long view, as exemplified by the unbridled optimism of some high school kids in Hutchinson, Kansas, and by the undaunted spirit of an eighty-year-old barber in Jefferson City, Missouri. “The world truly does renew itself while we’re looking the other way,” Barich observes.

From Maryland’s Eastern Shore through the spectacular landscape of the spectacular landscape of the Colorado Rockies to Steinbeck’s own Salinas Valley, filled with memorable encounters and rich in local color, Long Way Home is a truthful, moving account of the country in the early days of a new century. “Heh highway snakes into a tunnel,” Barich writes about a stretch of U.S. 50 in Utah, “then erupts into the light with the force of a revelation.”

“A wonderful writer. His angle of vision is his own, his prose is a delight.” –Larry McMurtry

“Barich is a splendid prose stylist. I will continue to look forward to anything he writes.” –Jim Harrison

“Few writers are as lucid and evocative as Barich, and no one provides more pleasure and insight page for page.” –Robert Stone

Bill Barich -

-Is the author of eight books, among them A Pint of Plain, Crazy for Rivers, Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California, and the racetrack classic Laughing in the Hills. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has written extensively for the new Yorker and many other publications. He lives in Dublin and California.