It takes a special kind of stylist to navigate subjects as disparate as the legacy of Lewis and Clark and the history of Kum and Go convenience stores. Cross Country is written in the present tense, with a range and relish of ordinary life that echoes Whitman, and an eye for the weird poetry of deceptively bland American landscapes. Sullivan's is the voice of the magisterial naïf. When he permits himself sarcasm, it's usually gentle comedy and reserved for his own foibles, such as his gear-fetish preoccupation with unreliable roof cases or his panic every time the Check Engine light goes on. Over the course of four days, the author never seems to lose faith that nearly everyone and everything a driver can encounter out on and along the interstates of America is beguiling. That he's on an interstate and not one of William Least Heat-Moon's "blue highways" is one of his main points of contention. "... [T]he real America is [the one] Americans generally think they are not seeing on the roads they use to cross the country."
And so what in a lesser writer's hands could be a tedious travelogue stuffed with pretentious observations about the banality of America—that is to say, yet another reason to fly—becomes a hilarious account of one expeditious American family and an unexpectedly affirming portrait of America—the strange, almost-enchanted America that is often overshadowed by the image of the country as a crass yahoo inferno of war-mongering, obesity and materialism.
Sullivan is almost pathologically observant, DWI with wonder. He seems never to have met a turn-out, rest stop or roadside attraction that didn't pique his curiosity. Cross Country spills over with facts, histories and aperçus; there are photos by his kids, Q&As, sketches from his journal and a cornucopia of irresistible trivia that bespeaks serious time in the library. Did you know that the first cross-country trip by car in 1903 took 63 and a half days? That oil companies used to brand their gas with colored dyes? Or that Route 12, which stopped just outside Missoula, Montana, was completed by local housewives hauling gravel on their own? Dangerous curves used to be marked with pictures of the grim reaper. The rearview mirror was invented at the Indianapolis Speedway, and Carl Fisher, the visionary who built the speedway, also started a company that made gas-powered lights for driving at night; one of the gas-light factories blew up next to a sauerkraut plant and splattered sauerkraut all over a nearby hospital.
"One of my personal goals," Sullivan declares at the outset, "is to run into some of the larger reasons that I am on the road in the first place, the institutional reasons, or at least some of the reasons that everybody else is. I have spent so much of my life on the road that I almost can't remember why I'm on the road anymore." Mercifully, Cross Country doesn't belabor the quest for institutional reasons or the deeper significance of why we are driven to drive across our continent. Sullivan doesn't allow his pauses for reflection to impede the momentum of the book, and we're happy to stop along with him when he has to duck into the bathroom because he's liable to happen on a brochure and report that 9 million Apthona flea beetles are controlling leafy spurge at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The long hours on the road are easily relieved by literary digressions through past travels, including a multipart tale of his "Worst Cross-Country Trip Ever." Possibly in the paperback edition he'll want to correct the misuse of the word "enervate" on Page 210, a small lapse of diction no doubt brought on by a coffee overdose, but otherwise, Cross Country is one of those books that speeds you flawlessly down the road, and makes you see the tired sights as if it were the first fresh morning of the world.