Two roads to Dodge City

Two Roads to Dodge City offers a vividly fresh look at today's Americans and their ways, by two gifted observers--father and son. This portrait of the country and its people from coast to coast is revealing, understanding, entertaining, and full of surprises. Nigel, the father, starts in Miami, driving in easy stages with stops in small towns and large cities up the coast to Canada, then down the middle of the country to New Orleans, and up to his rendezvous with Adam. Thanks to his frequent visits to the States and his fame as a writer, he has easy access to the grand houses as well as the modest, to leaders of society, government, business, academia, as well as folks in towns and roadside stops. Son Adam, not yet thirty, but already author of several books--one of which, Frontiers, won the 1986 Somerset Maugham Award--wanders a lower road from Los Angeles through San Francisco, Oregon, Idaho, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Wyoming. A tall, unmistakably upper-class Englishman, he has an uncanny gift for swiftly striking up acquaintance with any kind and age of man or woman. His California, for example, has an astonishing freshness, and his experiences with the young and wild, the comfy and the raunchy, the settled and the nomadic, are a joy to share. The diversity of the Nicholsons' adventures and views, together with the affection, argument, and mutual stimulus which link them across the ever-narrowing 3,000-mile gap, combine to make this an unusual and exciting book.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.