The Next Better Place: A Father and Son on the Road

by Michael C. Keith

Book Overview

At the age of eleven, Michael Keith left a stable life with his mother and sisters and set off to cross the country with his irresponsible hobo of a father--a real bum. The memoir, narrated without sentimentality by this funny, world-wise little boy, describes their life on the road--the characters they meet hitching rides, their adventures with bed bugs in Salvation Army bunks, the joys of finally encountering a decent meal, and the periods when...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565123646
• ISBN13: 9781565123649
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A Fascinating Book

This is a wonderful book. "A road trip with an alcoholic father and a child? Must be a downer," you'd think. Not so. Never sliding into self-pity, the author just lays out a personal cross-country saga in mesmerizing detail. At times heartbreaking, this book is ultimately an inspirational story of survival by a child who deserved better. I've read a lot of travel narratives, and this is as good as they come.

Coming of age story of the highest order

The author combines memoir, travelogue and coming of age story forms to take you with him on a sad but incredibly funny journey with his alcoholic, grass-is-always-greener father. The facts are heartbreaking but the boy is gonna make it and you know that as you go with him. If you having any wanderlust you will be looking out the window after reading this book. The writing is first-rate with memorable passages. I read half of the book before leaving the bookstore! It didn't hurt that he starts his journey in Albany, which happens to be my home, getting all the details right as he heads to California. But all the rest is purely universal. A must read.

brilliant wanderings

The book reads even better the second time around, and the Afterword addresses some questions I was left with. A real fun romp. It would make a great road flick.

A Triumph of Memory, a Tempest of Imagination

Smiling ghosts of Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac hover over many pages of Michael Keith's "The Next Better Place." This captivating book places Keith squarely in the same row with America's finest writers of the road adventure story. Which is to say that "The Next Better Place" is so much more than a memoir-cum-novel of a precocious son traversing America's great expanses with an ageing picaro of a father. Keith knows when to embroider his book's perfectly intoned dialogue, tremulous details, and charming teenage bravado with both lyrical pathos and hints at the perverse. The greatest American road novel, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," also came to mind as I devoured Keith's book, and I can only hope that Keith will soon reward his readers with another one.

Nostalgic review of a traveling boyhood

This delightfully written novelized memoir will hold your interest throughout. Now a professor of electronic media at Boston College, Keith takes us back to his boyhood and the always-on-the-road travels he shared with his well-meaning but ill-fated father who was always in quest of "the next better place" to find acceptance if not a viable livelihood. Along the way we meet a perfectly amazing cornucopia of characters and places and situations all of which were more typical of a 1950's America before Interstate highways made everything the same. Keith's descriptions and characterizations are both visual and compelling showing that, though he was only briefly in formal schools, he surely learned a lot about life with this seemingly aimless bus and hitchhiker mode of travel. Keith's tale combines a sometimes wistful tone with the insight that comes early when you are forced on your own resources for lack of much parental guidance. He has done well in recreating his thoughts and ideas in the context of a twelve-year-old amidst an adult world into which he is thrust all too quickly. The writing is compelling---you want to know what place is coming next, and what people he (and we) will meet along the way. Recommended!