The story could end there if Angie didn’t share their whereabouts with her fiancé, Randy Zapf, a guy with a “Charles Manson fantasy,” in O’Brien’s words. They hide out in Mexico, but the robbery isn’t reported, revealing greater crimes. He kidnaps bank teller Angie Bing, a young born-again motormouth with a savior complex and an amusingly unabashed libido. The man at the wheel is a former husband, father, journalist, and JC Penny employee, and a current alcoholic, who calls himself Boyd Halverson. “Millions of people think everything’s gonna be better when you’re in your RV, forgetting squabbling with your wife, and your kids yelling in back, and the lines at Yellowstone are 20 miles long and the grizzly bears eat your dinner.” “The road trip is one of the American fantasies,” he says. Odometers spin some 7,000 miles, from fictional Fulda (which O’Brien puts in Shasta County, Calif., notorious for extreme anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers) to real Bemidji (in O’Brien’s home state of Minnesota) and back, with many points in between. O’Brien, who is arguably still best known for his bestselling 1990 story collection The Things They Carried, sees the journey as a “moral tug-of-war.” It begins in 2019 with a bank robbery and a Buick LeSabre, and ends one year and several bodies later in a Ferrari Superfast. But it’s more Mad Max than National Lampoon’s Vacation. I feel now that I owe myself a road trip.”Ī road trip drives America Fantastica (HarperCollins, Oct.). “But making sentences that are reasonably graceful and connect to one another is hard work. “I had a kind of perverse fun writing it,” he says. Granted, he said the same thing about 2019’s Dad’s Maybe Book in the War & Peace of Tim O’Brien documentary, an intimate look at the 76-year-old writer and his wife as they raise two sons, born when O’Brien was 58 and 60, respectively. With his next breath he says, speaking via Zoom from his home in Austin, Tex., that America Fantastica is his last book. Tim O’Brien lights a Carlton, takes a drag, and says he’s going to quit smoking.
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