The Road Trip that Changed the World
by Mark Sayers
Moody Publishers, 285 pp.

Mark Sayers has written an illuminating work in The Road Trip that Changed the World. Part cultural rug-puller, part prophetic instruction, the book highlights how the licentious life of 1950s beat writer Jack Kerouac came to influence western culture and, inevitably, parts of the Christian world.

On the one hand, it could turn out to be deadly. The film version of Kerouac’s life out later this year shows (though it doesn’t come with Eternity’s recommendation) that there really is no euphemising the hollowness and misogyny of the lives of Kerouac and his friends. As C.H. Spurgeon once wrote, “Highly cultured soul-murderers will find their boasted ‘culture’ to be no excuse on the day of judgment”. Thus if Sayers’ work serves only to introduce a generation of confused young adults to Jack Kerouac, well, Triple J and MTV could have done that.

But the author’s motives are more precise. As he told me in an interview, he uses Kerouac’s life as a “cautionary tale”. The point is not that readers become more “cultured” but that we discern how much we are influenced by Kerouac’s often misinterpreted notion of self-discovery-via-travel, and instead resolve to live according to the cross of Christ. By the end of the book few cultural stones remain unturned. Sayers highlights the robust example of Abraham’s life and exposes: “passive”, “reactive” young men; those “on the hunt for ‘woosh’ moments”; and the vapidness of a world where the digital displaces the communal.

Sayers is stunningly familiar with the canon of our culture and the light he sheds sometimes floors the reader. Floating between the United States, the UK, Japan, and Australia, he makes the regular holy, which is most tragic when we find that our Christian worlds have often made God familiar. Sayers presents us with a compelling analysis that for some may prove to be the beginning of coming to know the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. For others, the book may be a refining word from God that shows up just how temporal a road trip mindset is.

Featured image: sxc.hu/drniels