[In the following review, Clines praises Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century as full of "wit, discovery, and self-deprecation."]

In their separate careerings in time among American epiphanies, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac went beyond self-concoction to achieve an originality that made it all look easy: hit the road, get to the core, bang us in the heart with words that access the routine beauty and pain of daily life. Their work remains so readable and so indelibly American that it's no wonder that fresh attempts at wandering the nation and mapping its presumptive soul go forward with the inevitability of book advances.

Lately, a formula seems to be overtaking much of the wandering. It often features a narrator using the internal combustion engine as Muse, with highway subbing for plot line, and dialogue bites from grizzled, terse denizens as American chorus. The exercise seems preoccupied with climacteric more than climax. For it often involves a restless, mid-something male deciding he must go off alone in America driving his favorite stripped-down or optioned-up vehicle—generically, a 19-ought-something four-cylinder Testosterone will do, with a pint of Anomic stashed in the glove compartment—and searching for at least that minimum of surprise and originality to fulfill a book contract, with maybe a fender-dent of transcendence thrown into the bargain.

The genre is no replacement for the lost American novel, at least not yet. But a reader does begin itching for a clearer line between uncanny reportage and not-so-creative fiction, considering how some of the latest examples pack in long coils of conversation in folksy contracted dialects that would seem too complex to be totally retrieved from the memory of a truly guileless wanderer. Contrarily, some of the better writing includes perfectly realized fragments of lives so burnished and broken that Flannery O'Connor's peacocks might be set to preening with envy.

Then again, there is Andrel Codrescu, a naturalized American and the most American writer of all in the current offerings of motorized searchers. Mr. Codrescu, a poet who is best known as an essayist on National Public Radio, takes this drive-time script and turns it inside out into a fine trick bag of wit, discovery and self-deprecation in a book badly titled Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century.

From the outset, he is smart enough to anticipate the main pothole in driving a 1968 red Cadillac and retracing his own racy immigrant roots (he was born in Romania and came to the United States in the 1960's) through the locales of Hippiedom "I expected to find nothing in those places," he concedes, "partly because there would be little time to discover anything genuine, and partly because I never found anything of interest deliberately; the best discoveries of my life have been by accident." Fortunately, he changed his mind upon being advanced "a ridiculously small amount of money that was, however, more than my poetry had earned me in a lifetime of practicing its dangerous pinturns."

Mr. Codrescu takes off with a television documentary crew and a photographer, David Graham, who complements the author well in glimpsing the random nonsense and unreliable reality of things in general. It is a measure of Mr. Codrescu's talent that such an orchestrated mission manages to produce an unpretentious, wry journey in the art of essay writing, from light to sparsely serious. Once at the wheel of America's "banal instrument of carnage," the writer buys fuzzy dice and a drink holder and begins driving from his New Orleans home to the Lower East Side digs of Allen Ginsberg. There they lightly agree to plot for the reburial of the poet Ted Berrigan's remains in the St. Mark's Church grave of Peter Stuyvesant, documented in passing from Mr. Codrescu's interesting store of American antihistory as a founding anti-Semite.

Thus does he putter in a kind of countertravelogue about the land, all the way to San Francisco, via the "Kingdom of It," Las Vegas, with rarely a dull page in this simple book. It is mainly about the fun of writing and reading and meandering, rather than self-conscious synthesizing. Better for the reader to have Mr. Codrescu philosophically accepting a fax about the next city's lodgings from a cemetery attendant in Camden, N.J., who intrudes as the writer tries to have a special thought at the grave of Whitman, "sexually manifold and optimistic, the spokesman of liberty in all its guises."

Non sequitur, no harm. We're soon visiting the Burned-Over Patch region of surviving zealotries in a narrow swath of rural western New York. First, the Hutterians, the Christian communist and pacifist refugees who fled Hitler to live in Amish like aloofness in a Bruderhof, or "place of brotherhood." Then the descendants of the Oneida Perfectionists, who lived in a community conceived in free love, where the poet pines for the lost spirit of "continual flirtation as in a medieval court of love." Mr. Codrescu is the sort of writer who feels obliged to satirize and interplay with reality and not just catalogue impressions. He can redeem flagging curiosity in a single sentence, as when, returning to Detroit haunts he loved as a student, he finds he must wax more Mad Maxish than Whitmanesque; "I see that when a city becomes extinct, its last inhabitants go crazy."

Mr. Codrescu is a reminder that locomotion is not the heart of the matter; a decent imagination is. Opinionated travelogue inventories of Americana won't do. Nor will serial compilations of unforgettable characters suffice, as Pete Davies proves in "Storm Country: A Journey Through the Heart of America." Mr. Davies, a British novelist, is tireless as a lepidopterist in netting what feels like each and every flitting Midwesterner he spies in his travels (13 states, 1981 Ford pickup) in the heartland "with its savage weather and its sentimental music." He packs his pages with characters, and the friends and relatives of these characters, each of them with a story to tell and each story pretty much told in his book to the point of Chaucerian overdrive. "It's the nearest thing I know to going to the moon—and I love it!" he exults as he wheels about, trying to document the withering of "the whole mythic notion of what America is" and capturing individual lives "fresh out of a country song." It is the latter quality that intoxicates the book all too well. He concludes his 7,449 miles by comparing America to "that girl you had that thing with when you were 20," an experience "bigger than good or bad, bolder than right or wrong." Well, I guess….