The Roads Taken: Travels Through America's Literary Landscapes.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

Unlike books by countless others who have rediscovered America as a single, extended confrontation with the continent, The Roads Taken is an account of seven discontinuous excursions with different companions. The author visits Texas, Nebraska, Nevada, Michigan, New Orleans, and Maine and concludes at home with a ferry trip across the San Francisco Bay. A tutelary literary spirit--Larry McMurtry, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry David Thoreau, or Jack London--guides his thoughts at each site.

Despising what he calls "the blanching of America" and "the rampaging sameness that was flattening the nation," Setterberg is most invigorated in the Maine wilderness that Thoreau, "still our greatest crank," celebrated. When, after several days of searching for a moose, Setterberg and his companion Ann finally glimpse one, the event fills him with the hope "that there might always be one more chance for the wild, stubborn genius of the unpaved nation."

West Texas is not entirely paved over by the time Setterberg and a partner named Lonny drive through it, but a chapter on the experience suffers from a failure to connect. At its best, Setterberg's book offers fresh encounters mediated by his vivid impressions and those of authors he admires. However, once he arrives at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Setterberg seems infected by banalities about how the Lone Star state is "still a big enough...