Nine of the best road trip novels

Bud Smith works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (2022), Double Bird (2018), Dust Bunny City (2017), among others. His fiction has been published in The Paris Review, The Believer, The Baffler, and The Nervous Breakdown, and many others (collected below). He is also a creative writing teacher and editor.

At Lit Hub he shared nine of his favorite road trip novels, including:

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

An absurdist war novel. A high art page turner. A soldier decides to go AWOL, and walk from Vietnam to Paris. His platoon goes after him, on the strangest walk of their lives. Beyond the borders of their war, into the hallucinogenic territory of the soul. The same dream logic that seemed to guide the U.S.’s botched war effort, guides the telling of this novel about fleeing that same effort. O’Brien won a deserved National Book Award for this one. It’s hilarious, wrenching, goes farther and wilder than most would ever imagine and then goes a little farther still.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

Going After Cacciato is among Anthony Swofford's five best books about war by authors who served.

--Marshal Zeringue