FICTION

AMERICA BY LAND: A Novel by Robert Olmstead (Random House: $20; 241 pp.) Robert Olmstead’s third book is indeed a novel, as the subtitle says, but it’s hard to tell whether “America by Land” is intended to be a serious work or updated pulp fiction. “Most of what’s left behind is left behind,” Olmstead writes at one point: “Out on the road you don’t need what’s left behind, unless you need it.” Earlier, the protagonist Redfield tells his cousin and sidekick Juliet--Redfield and Juliet, get it?--”I only know what I don’t want to be . . . I don’t want to be weak or reasonable.” Redfield should be a tad insufferable--he’s a college dropout riding his motorcycle on a cross-country search for Meaning, which he seems to find in helping Juliet retrieve the child she had previously put up for adoption--but Olmstead apparently takes Redfield as seriously as Redfield takes himself. The result is a novel that breezes along without going anywhere interesting and culminates in the couple disappearing into Mexico feeling “free at last.” The basic problem with “America By Land,” in short, is that it wasn’t published 25 years ago, when some of the ideas and moods it contains were fresh.