Ancient Highway
By Bret Lott
Random House, New York, NY; 241 pp., 2008

He’d heard it already, the cold and steady promise way off, building after building but still way off, not yet even to the trestle over Rogers Creek. But coming.

In these opening lines, the narrator sets the stage for a story that takes on the road, the ancient highway toward self-realization. Earl is the first character the reader meets. At the age of barely fourteen, Earl runs away from his home in a dusty Texas town. He’s pursuing his happiness. He’s broken away from his family and has already seen several “flickers,” movies in our modern parlance.

We follow Earl’s personal path toward freedom for whatever that might be. His mind is wrapped up in the ideas he’s learned from the movies. They’ve expanded his horizons far beyond the dried up family farming business in Texas. His ambition looks high up to gaining a position as a Hollywood star. He leaves his home with hardly five dollars and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, hops on a freight train, and never looks back. Earl hits the road for his own destiny, and it’s the restless, nervous, and hard baked life of a pioneer out to discover his own world. This is the heart beat of American culture and the west.

This literary story begins in 1927 and its central narrator is Brad, Earl’s grandson. As a literary novel, it does require the reader to be literate enough to follow a plot that, like its characters, wonders through time. The story line weaves a yarn through three generations of an American family, its internal resentments, secrets, hatreds, and love. The reader has to pay attention to who is who and when.

Once in Los Angeles, Earl burns every bit of his energy to gain roles in the “flickers.” He finally meets the girl of his dreams, a talented singer named Saralee. She falls in love with him because they’ve fallen in love, simple as that. These are simple people in what might seem in hindsight from today’s perspective to be simple times.

It’s a period in American history, not that long ago, when divorce was an overwhelming shame, especially for the middle class. If anyone every really went through with such an unspeakable act, no one ever dared to talk about it. It was one of the most hidden family secrets as taboo as incest or rape.

Earl and Saralee have a wonderful daughter, Joan who becomes an adult at nine years old. She has issues with her parents who, according to her, were more like children than parents in helping her to grow up. Blaming her parents for her lot in life seems to represent some typical aspect of our modern American culture. Joan carries the burden of several family secrets.

The reader never learns to the name of Joan’s husband, father of her son Brad. And there are other secrets about how Earl never wanted to return to Texas and his family even when they could offer him a comfortable career in the railroad.

Brad grows up to appreciate and understand his grandparents and to love his mother. He survived the Vietnam War and lives to tell the tale of three generations of a working class American family that lives to discuss their past while watching the old “flickers” together under the same roof. And the reader learns much about the influences that art, that story telling, and that dreaming can have on helping individuals to pursue their dreams.

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