The Last Great Road Bum

Starred review from February 17, 2020
Tobar’s stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws from the unbelievable true story of Joe Sanderson, a peripatetic would-be-writer who left a comfortable existence in Urbana, Ill., in order to travel the world in search of material for a great American novel. Instead, he found romance, danger, and the dark heart of the mid-20th century. After falling in love with life on the road in 1960 as a high school senior traveling alone in Mexico City, Joe hitchhikes his way across Jamaica, narrowly escaping a government crackdown on the Rastas he’d fallen in with. Then it’s on to South America, where Joe embraces the life of a vagabond before setting out again and experiencing historical events across the globe. In Saigon, he surveys the aftermath of the Tet Offensive; and in Biafra, he crisscrosses war zones in emulation of his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. All the while, Joe begins writing and occasionally finishes unpublishable novels with titles like The Prince of Castaways, Caledonia, and The Silver Triangle. Working from a massive archive of Sanderson’s letters, journals, and doomed forays into fiction, Tobar discovers the real story in Joe’s life, following him into his fateful decision to join the paramilitary rebels in El Salvador. Throughout, Joe appears in footnotes to dispute the veracity of the account of Tobar, the “Guatemalan dude” who fictionalized his remarkable life. No matter; Tobar brilliantly succeeds in capturing Joe’s guileless yearning for adventure through high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry. Tobar’s wild ride achieves a version of Kerouac for a new age.

April 1, 2020
A white Midwestern boy's wanderlust sends him on an unlikely path around the world and deep into the Salvadoran revolution. Tobar's third novel is based on the true story of Joe Sanderson, who was, among other things, a failed writer; his overheated prose, appearing in letters home and rejected novels, is quoted often. But his copious journals and letters also provide a narrative throughline for this shaggy dog epic. Tobar stumbled upon Sanderson's diary in El Salvador in 2008, and the author is plainly charmed by the story of an all-American gringo who gave up a comfortable upbringing to see the world. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, Joe caught the travel bug early, exploring nontourist pockets of Jamaica as a teen on a family vacation. After brief college and Army stints, he bummed rides through Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia, witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and the famine in Biafra. Tobar renders Joe as na�ve and dispassionate early on, a young man eagerly gathering fodder for his bad novels but not gaining much empathy. And though Tobar is a gifted storyteller in both fiction (The Barbarian Nurseries, 2011) and nonfiction (Deep Down Dark, 2014), his hero's lack of emotional growth makes much of the heart of the novel draggy and listless. (Joe occasionally interrupts the narrative via footnotes in which he speaks directly to the reader, mentioning that Tobar's editor and agent recommended he "trim the shit out of" the novel. True or not, it's not bad advice.) The novel gains thrust and becomes more affecting in its final third, when Joe joins the anti-government revolutionaries in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early '80s; Tobar's depiction of the 1981 El Mozote massacre is chilling and imagines a genuine shift in Joe's character. Though the protagonist will test your patience with his road stories, he has some great ones.

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Starred review from July 1, 2020
When Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, a son of the middle class, was a teenager, he met a British adventurer who had circumnavigated the globe solo; what a great thing it would be, Joe thought, if he could do the same. To think was to act, for several years later he became the quintessential road bum and hitchhiker, following his thumb through 70 countries around the world. The vividly realized particulars of his restless journeys are offered in Tobar's remarkable novelization of Sanderson's real life, his adventures and misadventures. The book divides naturally into two sections, the first detailing the 20 years of his wanderings; the second describing his arrival in El Salvador, a country in the midst of a revolution, where he persuaded the rebels to let him join them, and so the legend of Lucas (Sanderson's nom de guerre) began. It would end heartbreakingly two years later with Sanderson's death in 1982, at 39, in combat. Why his wanderlust? In part, it was due to his determination to have enough experiences to enable him to write the great American novel, an ambition that remained unrealized. And yet, his life itself has inspired what is inarguably a great novel, a tribute to him that is beautifully written and spectacularly imagined. Tobar writes that it took him 11 years to complete this wonderful book. Readers will rejoice that he persisted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2020

An award-winning journalist (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free) and novelist (The Barbarian Nurseries), Tobar was writing for the Los Angeles Times in 2008 when he uncovered the story of Joe Sanderson, an Illinois kid who left his home in the 1960s to wander the globe and write a great novel. Here, Tobar weaves Sanderson's diaries and letters into a novel about his life. Bouncing from country to country, Joe travels through war zones in Vietnam and joins the Red Cross in Biafra while remaining connected to his family in Urbana through letters and postcards. However, when Joe joins the guerrilla rebels in the Salvadoran civil war, his journey transforms from experiential to immersive, and his tether to his family, country, and ultimate objective loosens. VERDICT Tobar conjures the narrative spirit of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums in juxtaposing the seeming placidity of the American Midwest and a life in search of truth and authenticity. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of New York Times best-selling nonfiction (Deep Down Dark) and celebrated fiction (The Barbarian Nurseries), Tobar retells the life of Illinois-born Joe Sanderson, an eager and idealistic "road bum" whose peregrinations led him from Jamaica and Vietnam to Nigeria and El Salvador, where he died fighting with the country's guerrillas.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.