Two-Way Street: Or Three Theories on Recent Road Trip Novels

Right now I'm reading Lauren Barnholdt's Two Way Street. Although my dissertation is not exclusively about roadtrips, everything I do looks at how adolescence is economically defined. This is not to say that I think it should be economically defined, but rather that ya lit again and again seems to define it in those terms. The car tends to be the metaphor that most often represents this economic definition of adolescence and the movement from child to adult. Because of that, I read a lot of road trip novels. Lately I've noticed some things that I'm not quite sure what to do with.

The classic YA roadtrip novel is Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road. It's not necessarily a classic because of age, but is one of the first that was a) popular and b) was about a teen driving across the country. Bauer's novel doesn't specify the year that the story takes places, but it reads as a look back at an adolescence of an earlier generation. Bauer concentrates on the characters and their development and doesn't spend much time describing the ephemeral conditions of adolescence in Jenna's life. Her novel is about the growth from adolescence, and not surprisingly moves along a north/south trajectory.

In the last 4-5 years, however, there seem to be lots of YA novels that do the exact opposite. Barnholdt's novel reads more like two people in a small space who talk about pop culture (okay, I get that that is probably would a adolescent road trip would look like) who just happen to be moving across the country (north, for those who are interested in my map theory). Jordan's SUV is really just a means of keeping the pair in a small space for a prolonged period of time in which they concentrate mostly on how many pieces of popular culture they can consume simultaneously. This novel will be out of date within a couple of years. For example, Courtney and Jordan spent most of their relationship debating whether Laguna Beach or OC is better. I know teens like it, or at least those pretending to be teens on Amazon's reviews say things like:

this book has the modern twist of what it is really like to be a teen now a days. i like how it goes from the past to the actual trip.

Bernholdt's not alone in this ephemeral move. Andy Behren's All the Way is full of pop culture references and has been made into a MTV movie (with quite possibly the most offensive movie poster I've seen in a very long time) to be released this October. The upside of this production is that it proves my point that in adolescent literature cars are often metaphors for sex because we can't talk about sex and adolescents without getting into censorship issues. The weird side is that the road trip is becoming less and less of a "classic" tradition and more and more of a pop culture plot.

The comment that the trip doesn't become the focus is particularly interesting to me. In some ways that Amazon reader made me think about something that I hadn't realized before--it's becoming less and less about the car. I have three theories about this

1. My theory based on no evidence at the moment: Cars are becoming less and less accessible due to rising gas prices. Pop culture is now more of a solid aspect than the car. YouTube keeps everything accessible, gas prices don't keep cars accessible.
   
2. My more supported theory: the road trip at one time showed literal movement, but now the car itself has become such an accepted metaphor that authors can spend the novel on the pop culture that their readers would be familiar with. Bauer couldn't do this because she was already setting up something new.
3. My cynical theory: more recent road trip novels are written by authors who don't really care about what their novels do in the long term and only care about how many books they will sell this summer. The OC will sell books.
   

That doesn't mean, however, that the vehicle is disappearing. In fact the vehicle seems to becoming present in a variety of novels. Even Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy associates the official sanctioning of hoverboards with the movement into the adult realm. I'm not sure what to do with all of this. I think that there is something going on here, and I'm not sure what it is.