The last great road bum

Héctor Tobar, 1963-

Book - 2020

"In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a 'road bum,' an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, wh...ich chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador--a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live--a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off."--provided by publisher.

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Subjects
Genres
Biographical fiction
Action and adventure fiction
Road fiction
Historical fiction
Published
New York : MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020.
Language
English
Main Author
Héctor Tobar, 1963- (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Maps on endpages.
Physical Description
xii, 396 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780374183424
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, a son of the middle class, was a teenager, he met a British adventurer who had circumnavigated the globe solo; what a great thing it would be, Joe thought, if he could do the same. To think was to act, for several years later he became the quintessential road bum and hitchhiker, following his thumb through 70 countries around the world. The vividly realized particulars of his restless journeys are offered in Tobar's remarkable novelization of Sanderson's real life, his adventures and misadventures. The book divides naturally into two sections, the first detailing the 20 years of his wanderings; the second describing his arrival in El Salvador, a country in the midst of a revolution, where he persuaded the rebels to let him join them, and so the legend of Lucas (Sanderson's nom de guerre) began. It would end heartbreakingly two years later with Sanderson's death in 1982, at 39, in combat. Why his wanderlust? In part, it was due to his determination to have enough experiences to enable him to write the great American novel, an ambition that remained unrealized. And yet, his life itself has inspired what is inarguably a great novel, a tribute to him that is beautifully written and spectacularly imagined. Tobar writes that it took him 11 years to complete this wonderful book. Readers will rejoice that he persisted.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Tobar's stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws from the unbelievable true story of Joe Sanderson, a peripatetic would-be-writer who left a comfortable existence in Urbana, Ill., in order to travel the world in search of material for a great American novel. Instead, he found romance, danger, and the dark heart of the mid-20th century. After falling in love with life on the road in 1960 as a high school senior traveling alone in Mexico City, Joe hitchhikes his way across Jamaica, narrowly escaping a government crackdown on the Rastas he'd fallen in with. Then it's on to South America, where Joe embraces the life of a vagabond before setting out again and experiencing historical events across the globe. In Saigon, he surveys the aftermath of the Tet Offensive; and in Biafra, he crisscrosses war zones in emulation of his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. All the while, Joe begins writing and occasionally finishes unpublishable novels with titles like The Prince of Castaways, Caledonia, and The Silver Triangle. Working from a massive archive of Sanderson's letters, journals, and doomed forays into fiction, Tobar discovers the real story in Joe's life, following him into his fateful decision to join the paramilitary rebels in El Salvador. Throughout, Joe appears in footnotes to dispute the veracity of the account of Tobar, the "Guatemalan dude" who fictionalized his remarkable life. No matter; Tobar brilliantly succeeds in capturing Joe's guileless yearning for adventure through high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry. Tobar's wild ride achieves a version of Kerouac for a new age. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

An award-winning journalist (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free) and novelist (The Barbarian Nurseries), Tobar was writing for the Los Angeles Times in 2008 when he uncovered the story of Joe Sanderson, an Illinois kid who left his home in the 1960s to wander the globe and write a great novel. Here, Tobar weaves Sanderson's diaries and letters into a novel about his life. Bouncing from country to country, Joe travels through war zones in Vietnam and joins the Red Cross in Biafra while remaining connected to his family in Urbana through letters and postcards. However, when Joe joins the guerrilla rebels in the Salvadoran civil war, his journey transforms from experiential to immersive, and his tether to his family, country, and ultimate objective loosens. VERDICT Tobar conjures the narrative spirit of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums in juxtaposing the seeming placidity of the American Midwest and a life in search of truth and authenticity. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A white Midwestern boy's wanderlust sends him on an unlikely path around the world and deep into the Salvadoran revolution. Tobar's third novel is based on the true story of Joe Sanderson, who was, among other things, a failed writer; his overheated prose, appearing in letters home and rejected novels, is quoted often. But his copious journals and letters also provide a narrative throughline for this shaggy dog epic. Tobar stumbled upon Sanderson's diary in El Salvador in 2008, and the author is plainly charmed by the story of an all-American gringo who gave up a comfortable upbringing to see the world. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, Joe caught the travel bug early, exploring nontourist pockets of Jamaica as a teen on a family vacation. After brief college and Army stints, he bummed rides through Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia, witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and the famine in Biafra. Tobar renders Joe as naïve and dispassionate early on, a young man eagerly gathering fodder for his bad novels but not gaining much empathy. And though Tobar is a gifted storyteller in both fiction (The Barbarian Nurseries, 2011) and nonfiction (Deep Down Dark, 2014), his hero's lack of emotional growth makes much of the heart of the novel draggy and listless. (Joe occasionally interrupts the narrative via footnotes in which he speaks directly to the reader, mentioning that Tobar's editor and agent recommended he "trim the shit out of" the novel. True or not, it's not bad advice.) The novel gains thrust and becomes more affecting in its final third, when Joe joins the anti-government revolutionaries in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early '80s; Tobar's depiction of the 1981 El Mozote massacre is chilling and imagines a genuine shift in Joe's character. Though the protagonist will test your patience with his road stories, he has some great ones. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.