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Title: Mad Monks on the Road/a 47,000-Hour Dashboard Adventure-From Paradise, California, to Royal, Arkansas, and Up the New Jersey Turnpike [ILLUSTRATED]
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Author: Michael Lane
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Review of Mad Monks on the Road/a 47,000-Hour Dashboard Adventure-From Paradise, California, to Royal, Arkansas, and Up the New Jersey Turnpike [ILLUSTRATED]

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Comments for Mad Monks on the Road/a 47,000-Hour Dashboard Adventure-From Paradise, California, to Royal, Arkansas, and Up the New Jersey Turnpike [ILLUSTRATED]

• Posted on 2000-07-08
  Ah, the Giddiness of Youth
  
  Mad Monks on the Road (the first book by perennially-traveling self-published magazinists and soulmates Michael Land and Jim Crotty) is one of those books I just didn't know what to do with when I finished; unlike any other book I've read recently, it had a weird disposible quality (I was half-expecting recycling instructions on the back cover)...yet it's, well, neat to have around.

  The story is by turns delightfully whimsical and maddeningly wispy. (Mike's hippie-ish and Jim's a Buddhist and both have an admirable sense of what's campy--and they run right at it.) The authors' habit of introducing each person they meet by zodiac sign made me cringe after a while, but perhaps that's just my personal bias. I've previously read The Mad Monks' Guide to California and Michael Lane's Pink Highways, and was really surprised by the sharp contrast in style (over so few years, no less). On the Road is a much less-tempered flight of fancy ("The Monks and How They Got That Way," kinda) which shares with Pink Highways only the nagging question of how much the reader can expect to be true (because it may well all COULD be, but it's hard to fathom living in the same world as these characters and not knowing it). Given the tone of the book, it isn't really surprising that even though their macrojourney is ostensibly from San Francisco to New York, they spend a large chunk of the book going from east to west.

  I would almost say it's worth reading just to be able to discuss the ambiguous relationship between the authors--Michael Monk is gay and Jim Monk is probably everything else--but that's really the least satisfying element of the book. Then again, maybe I'm just envious: the Monks have such funky friends and unfathomable (mis)adventures, if you've got the travel bug this book will only feed it.
  

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