Book Review : On the Road With Annie and Friends

On Other Days While Going Home by Michelle Carter (Morrow $15.95; 300 pages)

The rules-of-the-road novel tend to be strict and unwavering. A solitary person, usually young and American, hops into a car and drives across the continent in search of himself--or increasingly often, herself, learning various crucial lessons about life along the way. With any luck at all, the protagonist will arrive on the opposite coast improved, even transformed, or at least resigned. Because our geography lends itself so readily to this literary genre, the theme is a favorite of American writers.

In a road novel the driver must take it easy, stopping often to absorb atmosphere, search his soul, have significant insights. All that is almost impossible to achieve on the Autostrada between Milan and Verona at 200 kilometers an hour.

Begins in San Francisco

Though “In Other Days While Going Home” begins in the narrator’s jerry-built room behind a bail bond office in San Francisco, Annie soon takes off in her vintage Mustang for points east. Eighteen-year-old Annie is an orphan, brought up by her affectionate and independent Aunt Marie, the bail bondswoman. While this original environment has provided her with some extraordinary friends and acquaintances, Annie instinctively knows that none of these lovable eccentrics is an altogether suitable role model.

She wouldn’t trade her life for dreary conventionality, but there are early intimations that her special circumstances leave a lot to be desired.

Among Annie’s closest friends and constant companions are elderly and philosophical Black Robert, who manages the parking lot across from the Hall of Justice, and his permanent bride-elect Gloria, who commutes from her thriving car rental agency in Sacramento. Their long-deferred wedding is one of the book’s best scenes, a major impetus for Annie’s departure and an unmistakable sign that nothing remains the same forever. There’s also the sudden defection of glamorous, free-spirited Jotta, who has been in love with Tom, a Hell’s Angel whose macho notion of commitment involves frequent bouts of assault and battery.

When she finally catches up with him at the house of the old bluegrass musician, it’s obvious that Carter isn’t going to provide any answers, let alone a destiny. Papa Dad, who has been on the road himself, shows up and convinces Annie to continue her journey east in his company. The stopover in Wyoming has taught her that stay is one of the most ambiguous words in the language--meaning “what you call a time in your life when it’s the one thing you’re not allowed to do. You should get the hell out of here, I told myself. And go where? Back to my single bed in the back room? . . . So Carter wasn’t the man I wanted him to be. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be either.”

Thus enlightened, Annie moves on, now chaperoned by Papa Dad, who has reasons of his own to take extra-special care of her on the trip east (reasons that supply one of the few genuinely dramatic scenes in the novel). Annie is determined to find Jotta, who has abandoned the unsavory Tom to elope with a decent and prosperous man to Cape Cod, where she’s living in apparently blissful domesticity.

Unfortunately for the quest, the once irrepressible and ebullient Jotta has turned into a compulsive housewife; knitting, gardening, and cooking with a vengeance. She has even allowed herself to become pregnant--Jotta, who had always told Annie she hated kids. Just when this foray into the delights of the mundane looks as if it may succeed for her, wicked Tom, the spoiler from San Francisco, turns up in search of his old love.

Our Annie, who has absorbed a modicum of self-knowledge in the course of her trip, saves the day for everyone, at considerable danger to herself. In the last lines of the book, she sums up her experiences by realizing that “What mattered most was my having been there, and even more my having gone,” which is about all a road novel ever really promises--or delivers.