American novel concepts and historical development

¶ … American Novel

On the Road with Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons

The romance of the open road. The dusty highway. The screech of brakes and the roar of the gas pedal. All of these images come straight from Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On the Road, a tale of the American 1950's Beatnik experience, a tale of America viewed through travel and the window of a car. According to Kerouac, one is most American and yet most away from the pressures of one's family and American society when one is traveling. Yet Sharon Creech's book Walk Two Moons could also, in its own fashion, also be classified as a novel of the American road, very much along the lines of the Beatnik Kerouac.

Given that Jack Kerouac was telling a tale of deviancy and dropouts, rather than of familial connection and harmony, this thesis may sound strange to the ears, at first. Also, the fact that Sharon Creech is a contemporary children's book author may make the parallels with Kerouac's genre of 'road' novels and the Beatnik experience seem anachronistic. But both novels take as their themes that through travel, and specifically the contained form of travel that takes place by car on American highways, much is revealed about one's individual character and the human, emotional and individual experience. Both are tales of the adolescent experience, although Creech's protagonist is a relatively young adolescent, and Kerouac's narrator is a kind of grown adolescent.

Regardless of age, quintessential to the understanding of a 'on the road' novel is that distance and travel makes one more grounded and coherent as a human self and human person. The notion of adolescence as a time where one is better trying to understand one's self is not necessarily confined to a specific age of development. Over the course of the novel Walk two Moons, a young girl, thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, from Bybanks, Kentucky tells the reader a story of another young woman, the extravagantly named Phoebe Winterbottom. The fantastic nature of the tale recalls the fantastic nature of Kerouac's own meandering narrative thread, much like a meandering road, and the blurring of fiction and fact.

Salamanca has a more specific destination than Kerouac, granted. Salamanca is going across the country to Idaho rather than wherever the byways of the American road may take her. She is traveling with her grandparents, rather than with Kerouac's peculiar bunch of companions of varying stages of emotional stability. However, within both narrative flights of fantasy, the narrator also reveals honest snapshots of the truth, about her mother and her own sense of identity that is, in its own way, just as confused as Kerouac.

Striving for identity through changing one's place is what makes both Kerouac's 'road' novel and Creech's Walk Two Moons so quintessentially American in their character. The expansive quality of American's space makes extensive prolonged travel possible, so that an entire story can take place in the form of an extended journey. Yet despite traveling such a wide distance across the open road, the large nature of the playground that is America means that the struggling adolescent is still in America and is still, therefore, in a kind of home.