On the Road: 'Travel Writing' and 'Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine'

Peter Ferry's "Travel Writing" (Harcourt, 294 pages, $24) is the first debut novel I have read that includes, as a plot point, a forecast of its own sales. "We intend to sell a few books," announces the book's protagonist, who is also named Peter Ferry, as he throws the book down on the table of his enemy Dr. Albert Decarre, whose misdeeds will now be read about all over town, Pete declares, thanks to this book.

"Travel Writing" purports to be a book about writing, approaching the subject with a great deal of self-consciousness and straight talk both. In his opening scene, Pete is addressing his class of high school students, trying to convince them of the power of narrative by telling a story. It is sensational — a simple anecdote about a beautiful woman, possibly naked, driving recklessly on a suburban Chicago byway. His students are rapt (as is the reader, handily), even though Pete repeatedly mentions that this story isn't true, that he is just making it up.

And then it turns out that he isn't. Most of the story is true — and the actually not naked but definitely beautiful woman, Lisa Kim, becomes the subject of an obsession so powerful it destroys Pete's marriage and turns what is superficially a clockwork novel, a book of wheels within wheels, into what is essentially a well-told and enjoyable thriller.

As a thriller, "Travel Writing" is distinguished by its voice. Mr. Ferry is not young, and the quiet chutzpah that conceived his book's postmodern structure is the same that lends his fictional avatar a believable bravery. He is the sort of protagonist who crosses state lines to buy an illegal handgun (in Indiana), thinks clearly and vividly about what it would be like to use it, but eventually contents us more with his descriptions of good dinner parties and imported draft beers than with anything that could be called recklessness. As he sometimes almost admits, his pursuit of the truth about Lisa Kim's death is less a compulsion than a lucky hunch that becomes an irresistible hobby, a perfect lark in the clearing formed by midlife crisis.

An aging baby boomer whose father was a Presbyterian minister, Pete is full of priceless boyhood lore and grouchy, beguiling meditations on outgrowing irresponsibility and other life lessons. Despite its specific American flavors, "Travel Writing" seems most like a contemporary French novel, such as those by Christian Oster and Gregoire Bouillier, a book in which an atmosphere of established and almost enviable dailiness underwrites sophisticated narrative conceits.

Its title comes from Pete's sideline — his travel writing for newspapers when he's not teaching — and in some ways this book is a meditation on the weaker forms of literature, the unnecessary writings that ornament a good life without embarrassing it. The mental escapade after Lisa Kim works like this: Mocked by friends, appreciated by his students, Pete follows it through to his own satisfaction. Truth matters less than the telling, he teaches his students, and that makes for a cool, easy kind of fiction. It's not Hemingway or Borges, or even Dashiell Hammett, but it's nice.

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A different kind of travel writing, more adventurous but therefore far less close to home, comprises Stanley Crawford's cult favorite, "Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine" (Dalkey Archive Press, 113 pages, $12.95). Originally published by Knopf and then kept in print by a tiny press in New Mexico, the book has now safely made it into the Dalkey Archive.

The story of a trash barge covered in soil and planted like the Garden of Eden, with only Mr. and Mrs. Unguentine as its captain and crew, Mr. Crawford's book is a work of decisive imagination. Divided into 10 confessional chapters, the log, devoid of nautical measurements, is written by Mrs. Unguentine, who thinks that her husband has drowned.

It turns out that his apparent suicide was really an expedition in a diving bell. But after he comes back, we soon learn that he is never really present, emotionally. Over four or five decades afloat, he has gone years without speaking to Mrs. Unguentine, and so she suffers, referring with characteristic alliteration to "the silent stranger I now so selflessly serve."

But she is unreliable. As Ben Marcus notes in his Afterword, the marriage is not a loveless one; it is full of demonstration: The barge, which eventually boasts a high glinting dome, full of opening casements and rigged with quiet puffing sails, can be seen as an always-secret Valentine, prepared in silence, loaded with detail and sweet afterthoughts. But that vision, however sweet, is not what Mrs. Unguentine wants. She wants a child, and she wants land. In a reverie, she hears "all the roar and clatter of subways, the awful din of garbage cans being emptied: my own breathing, my heartbeats." While her husband madly putters, she carries a world of normalcy inside her.

Themes abound: Eden, apocalypse, the relationship of man to nature, the something-out-of-nothing gesture of a marriage. But in the experience of reading Mr. Crawford's short, dense book, these ideas are only tracings on the surface of his magnificent invention: the barge itself, a Rube Goldberg contraption that breaks down, ultimately, to a length of sentences. It is a creation not plastic but verbal. And Mrs. Unguentine speaks, it must be said, a beautiful but unbelievable speech. So much of American writing takes this tone of amazed writerly inspiration:

we both broke into song, into a lilting sort of aria, but unsyllabled and smooth and which trailed off into a low hum, charging the night sea until the horizon bubbled with sheet-lightning and the waters glowed with the pulsations of electronic plankton, and we fell silent.

The barge drifts, in the telling, made up as it goes along.

blytal@nysun.com