| Summary: |
Richard Lazar is advancing in years but regressing in life. After a career as a literary novelist that has ground to a halt and landed him in a trailer of Phoenix, Richard is surprised to find sudden success publishing a gritty memoir about his service in Vietnam. Sent on a book tour by his publishing house, Richard encounters his biggest (and really only) fan: an awkward, despondent student named Vance with issues of his own (an absentee father, a despressive mother, his own acute shyness). Soon Vance has volunteered to chauffeur Richard for the rest of the book tour, and the two embark on a disastrous (but often hilarious) cross-country trip. When things go wrong (as they inevitably do), Richard and Vance forge an unlikely bond between two misanthropes whose mutual insecurities and disdain for the world force both to look at each other, and their lives, in a more meaningful way. <p> As they reach the end of the book tour, <i>The Grand Tour</i> ultimately becomes a moving tale of unlikely friendship that will catapult Adam O'Fallon Price into the company of such masters of all-American dyspepsia as Sam Lipsyte, David Gates, and Walter Kirn. |
