All Roads Are Circles

All Roads are Circles is set in Canada in the mid-70s. It is a coming-of-age story, centered on two young American men who go on a hitchhiking trip together just after high-school graduation. Gil, from whose point-of-view the novel is told, is naive, bumbling and sincere, and a 17-year-old virgin, a condition that propels much of his inner and outer questing on the trip. He’s concealed his situation from Alan, his best friend and his companion on the journey.

Alan is cynical, and much more worldly than Gil; the fact that he is, beneath much sexual braggadocio, also a stealth virgin is one of the curves in the work’s road. From the start, the journey is impelled by tension between the two, exacerbated by Alan’s emotional difficulties in having been the driver in a recent car accident that paralyzed his younger brother. Gil and Alan move by thumb east from Vancouver, encountering many peculiar drivers and strange situations.

The novel moves into its higher gears when the two meet Mary, a fellow hitchhiker. Mary is realistic and tough and-in a guarded way-kind. Alan and Gil are both attracted to her, though neither can summon the chutzpah to act on their desires. The three travel together, with tensions rising. The last quarter of the novel is set in an apple orchard, where they meet again with Genesis, a character from an earlier road encounter. Genesis is a “mystic of the road,” whose wholesale hybridizing of all the world’s religious philosophies enthralls Gil. He is a central figure at story’s end.

The story has some of the rollicking elements and motion of On the Road, with some of the episodic humor of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The endless summer that Gil had envisioned never existed, but he does learn that friendship is earned under fire, at a weighty emotional cost.