All That Road Going

by A.G. Mojtabai

In the middle of the night, somewhere in Oklahoma--or is it Missouri?--a bus hurtles down an anonymous American highway. Its passengers, among them two children traveling on their own, a retired salesman, an unwed teenage mother, an unemployed chemist, and the driver who ferries and broods over all of them, are in the middle of their journeys. Soon, two of the passengers will be lost, and then the bus itself will lose its way.

The open...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810152002
• ISBN13: 9780810152007
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Triquarterly Books
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Haunting

The Highway to Hell has long had a soundtrack; now it has a novel. "All That Road Going" takes place almost entirely on a Greyhound bus traveling across the American midwest. But the bus really goes nowhere: those passengers who have a destination are destined, indeed, to suffer and fail when then arrive. Every character in the book is teetering on the brink of disaster, physically, spiritually, or emotionally. In reading this novel, you'll feel the razor's edge that separates them -- or fails to keep them separated -- from ruin. You won't want to put this down for the same reason that people can't help looking when then pass car accidents on the freeway. When you're done, the bleakness will haunt you for days. This book is a sad, touching, incisive look at the human condition, and I highly recommend it for the reader who enjoys books that make you think.

Several characters in search of belonging

You may not feel optimistic about the human condition after reading this book, especially the human condition in America. No, this isn't another post-9/11 critique. In fact, except for a few hints of popular culture (Princess Diana, video games, ramblings about a dot-com company from one passenger who mentions Samsung, PlayStation and NetGear), this book could be set at almost any time in our history. Despite the bewailing of some critics that the Internet and modern technology have isolated us from each other--BOWLING ALONE Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community comes to mind as an exploration of the trend towards individualism--the isolation has existed in other time periods. It does seem to be a uniquely twentieth- and twenty-first century phenomenon, however---AS I LAY DYING, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, THE STRANGER, WAITING FOR GODOT all speak of this disintegration and isolation. However, in A.J. Mojtabai's book, it's taken to the next level. Rootless passengers on a bus attempt to connect, but can't quite cross the barriers of their individual pains. An old woman, a pair of abandoned children, a former teenage unwed mother, a failed upholsterer/leather tanner, a man fleeing his dying wife, a homeless man with a lunchbox, and a woman already estranged from her new husband are characters we think we could never be, and yet we are them. They are Americans in conflict with society. They yearn for belonging, yet they flee it. The bus driver, O.M. Plumlee, is the most rooted character who acts as the good shepherd to this flock that has strayed so far away from "the good lfie". Indeed, in Mojtabai's novel, one wonders if "the good life" even exists any more. It's an important question to ponder. Most of us would prefer to ponder it intellectually, to experience tragedy and pathos vicariously, and say: thank God I'm not them and there for the grace of God go I. Be warned, for those who like a stunning plot and earth-shattering revelation about The Meaning Of It All, this is not the book for you. It's a gentle, meandering bus ride with subtleties and nuances. It left me with optimism that there still exists a writer in America today with the talent to write a book of this nature that doesn't slip into nihilistic cliches.

dark journey through middle america

A compelling story, told from the viewpoints of the driver and various passengers on a bus through Oklahoma and Missouri -- an aging bus on a journey across a bleak landscape with disappointed lives on board. The shifting viewpoints are an imaginative way to tell the story, and A.G. Mojtabai carries this difficult feat off with skill. The prose itself is sparse but evocative. The bus is going from nowhere to noplace, as are its passengers, whose lives don't intersect in any pat way, and yet the story is compelling and its characters believable, even worth watching. A tour de force, and admirable in its imaginative storytelling and its prose. Highly recommend.

quietly compelling mix of voices

"For the drift is ceaseless, unresting--and senseless . . . since nothing is ever settled, nothing changed. But, east to west and west to east, I ferry them--people leaving home or going back, fleeing the home that never was, seeking the home that never would be, setting out to find or lose themselves, they'd arrive, depart, be quit of . . . set forth again, dreaming out, something always beckoning up the road, around the bend, elsewhere. Always elsewhere" That's the pilot of bus 8213 and it's as beautiful a summary of this book as well as life and those living it as I can imagine. But be warned, it is an accurate description of Mojtabai's novel. If you want resolution, if you want things "settled", if you want characters with their "changes" from page 1 to page 200 drawn out in nice neat bold lines of black ink, if you want resolute or driven characters, or even all likable characters, you'll want to look elsewhere. Same for if you're looking for the boisterous, "buddy-bonding" road novel that the title, from Kerouac's On the Road, plays off of. This is not the novel for you. There is no freedom of the open road when one is riding a bus and anybody who has ridden one knows the "bonding" isn't all it's cracked up to be all too often. On the other hand, if you can deal with a lack of those things, then I highly recommend "All That Road Going". Like the pilot (the term for bus driver) who picks up his bus with most of his riders already having been aboard for some time, the reader arrives in the middle of a host of stories. And like the driver, we try to "size up the passengers right away"--based on dress and voice and snippets of conversation barely overheard. The reader has an advantage though as the narrative is split among the riders and the pilot, so we're given glimpses of interior thought as well. It's a mix of people on board, within reason (anybody with real money, for example, would probably be flying). There's a wide range of ages from under ten to over eighty; a mix of styles from pierced to prim; a mix of jobs from truckers to chemists; a mix of travel motives from fleeing connections to reestablishing connections. Their stories vary from tragic to mundane. And some seemingly have no story, which adds a sense of tension to the book. Most get their own say and Mojtabai does an excellent job for the most part in distinguishing their voices, shifting tone and syntax and dialect and vocabulary to better sharpen the characterization. The narrative shifts smoothly from one to the other and back again, snaking back and forth in time as well as the characters' pasts--recent and long ago--are revealed. Through and over it all hangs the driver's voice, the single constant who allegedly knows exactly where he's heading, where he's leaving, and why. There isn't a lot of backstory though. The book is slim and split up as it is among many voices we don't get to spend a lot of time with each. Some may find that frustrating bu

A Magic Bus Ride

I found this quiet book to be moving and compelling as it depicts the people riding on a bus in a rural area in the mid-West or Western US. A man who deserted his common law wife while she lay dying in a hospice as she cried out his name, a teenager who was raped by a friend of her stepbrother and kicked out by the stepmother when she became pregnant then pressured to give the baby up for adoption, two kids traveling alone, an older annoying woman, and a strange thin man always pulling on his crotch. What happens on this bus is drawn quietly into a loosely combined story of people traveling not just physically, but in their minds, inaccessible to the humans around them. The land they cross is stark and foreboding also and not friendly to humanity. A open dry hot landscape where little grows. I have not heard of the author before and would like to find out more about her.