The fantasy of leaving home for a faraway place has always held my imagination. As a boy, I dreamed of running away from our comfortable home to find new joys in the woods behind the Safeway. As an adult, I’ve twice sold my furniture and moved overseas. In novels, we know that when a character leaves for a trip, things are bound to go sideways. Still, there are levels to it, and it’s those travel novels that don’t just surprise, but unravel into something wholly bizarre and subversive and painfully human, that I love and come back to.
In my debut novel, Nice Places, a thirty-something named Georgie decides to travel the world for one year to escape the “daily existential discomfort” of his conventional life. But before he can even make it to the airport, a meditation guru robs him and he finds himself at a guesthouse in the bad part of his city, just miles from home. With only his phone and an unexpected community of guests and locals, his trip quickly takes a turn.
Here are some of my favorite novels that also feature trips going wrong.
Both the novel by Alex Garland, and film by Danny Boyle, have been oddly important in my life. About a backpacker in Thailand who receives a map that leads him to a secret utopian community of travelers, the movie The Beach informed my first distorted impression of what solo travel looked like, and years later, I read the book on my first trip to Japan, and discovered how fun it is to read a travel novel while traveling. Suffice to say, the Koh Samui utopia in the book descends into deep pits of human darkness, and many of its ideas around groupthink, colonial attitudes, and our human knack for corrupting beautiful places, are just as interesting today.
On the surface, All Fours by Miranda July and Nice Places share some commonalities. Both feature restless protagonists who leave home for a big trip but end up, almost immediately, staying somewhere closer to home. There’s an art project of sorts involved, too. And while both journeys of self discovery explore tensions between reality and fantasy, and the roles we are assigned and give ourselves, they unfold in wildly different ways. Like many, I was kept guessing while reading All Fours, and enjoyed all the ways an aborted trip can lead to an odyssey confronting notions of aging and midlife, marriage and intimacy, and desire in all its forms.
When people talk about modern travel novels, they inevitably, for good reason, bring up the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer. When my novel Nice Places was on submission, this was the case, probably to my detriment, as it’s hard to compare anything to Arthur Less’ whirlwind trip to literary events around the world to avoid attending the wedding of his ex‑boyfriend Freddy. The desperately cobbled together trip goes wrong, relentlessly, in all the ways you might imagine, but it’s the charm and sincerity that make the trip a delight to embark on, and revisit.
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
In the satirical eco-thriller by Yun Ko-eun, a program manager for a travel company that specializes in “disaster tourism” is sent to a remote island to assess its viability as a destination. There, she stumbles upon a conspiracy that sends her work trip spiraling. In swift and minimalist prose, The Disaster Tourist explores the exploitation and moral complicity that lurks throughout the modern tourism industry, and all the ways capitalism and travel are increasingly intertwined. This is certainly a book that my character Ant would recommend to Georgie in Nice Places.
The protagonist of Sky Daddy, Linda, is sexually attracted to airplanes, and has designed a modest life that allows for her secret desire to be fed. To be clear, Linda has zero interest in travel. That said, in order to engage with the handsome aircrafts she obsesses over, she must, by definition, go on trips. In Sky Daddy, every domestic flight she takes leads to some degree of disaster, from the viral moment on a flight to Houston to her final flight home with best friend Karina, which unfolds across one of my favorite last pages of any novel.
The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson
I read The Rum Diary after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels and was delightfully surprised by the quiet, observant prose of a young Hunter S. Thompson. It was so different from the manic energy of his later Gonzo journalism style. In the novel, an American journalist in the 1950s travels to San Juan to work at a struggling newspaper. Among the violence, chaos, disillusionment, and hard drinking, I had one thought: I need to go to Puerto Rico. Which is perhaps the greatest testament to the power of a well-done travel novel.
The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman
In the 1956 classic, W.E. Bowman spoofs mountaineering expeditions, with a joke density that would make The Naked Gun franchise proud. Following a team of incompetent climbers led by the pompous Binder as they attempt to scale the fictional mountain of Rum Doodle, the book fully commits to the satire, the silliness, and the mishaps. The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a rare true comedy novel and everything goes wrong, on every page and at every leg of this trip, and it certainly had to be included on this list.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Vincent Chu is the author of the story collection Like a Champion (7.13 Books, 2018). His fiction has appeared in Muumuu House, STILL Magazine, Pithead Chapel, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. Vincent is a Hambidge Fellow, former Headlands Center for the Arts Affiliate Artist, and Pushcart Prize nominee. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from UCLA. Vincent lives with his wife and son in Oakland, California.