Saturday Review: “Where the Road Ends” a review by Barbara Bennett of Charles Frazier’s The Trackers (2023)
The Fall online issue will be released later this month; in the meantime, here is another of the reviews from that issue.
Regular NCLR reviewer Barbara Bennett reminds us that “Southerners have a long history of going West,” from Huckleberry Finn to one of Doris Betts’s characters and now Val, the protagonist of Charles Frazier’s latest novel. Val lights out for western territory, according to Bennett, “full of the romance of the West with its wide-open spaces and promises of freedom and grandeur.” Bennett argues that the novel is “about the need for movement, for being on the road. Even the cover shows a road heading somewhere unknown. Frazier asks what a nation in love with the road does when that road ends and we can no longer go west to escape our problems.”
Read the review before it is published this fall and buy the novel from your local independent bookstore.
