“I believe in the country America used to be, I believe in the person I want to become. I believe in the freedom of the open road.”
- Lana Del Rey
Driving somewhere while going nowhere is the American Dream. When I was 22, I still lived at my parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs. For a reprieve from the mundanity along with a gross desire to indulge my own self-mythology, I would drive north for an hour or more in search of the perfect vantage point overlooking Lake Michigan where I would smoke a Marlboro Ice and brood. One could get lost driving through the upper Midwest with its deep, dark woods, expanses of empty highway punctuated by the occasional glowing “BAR” sign, and low-slung, grey winter skies.
Meaghan Garvey knows well the hypnotic power the road holds for introspection as well as the inherent humanity one can find among the regulars at those solitary dive bars. For her debut novel Midwestern Death Trip (Panamerica, 2026), Garvey attempts to get to the bottom of the Midwest mythos, less concerned with certainty than with what meaning people derive from the stories we tell both ourselves and others. From supper clubs, barstools, and the driver's seat of her blood-red 1993 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, she examines the haunted loneliness of America, herself no stranger to that loneliness, and the bars where people seek solace. The book could be described as a memoir: childhood flashbacks, meditations on her dead mother, and vignettes of ex-boyfriends abound. Or maybe it’s a road novel, a new addition to the canon of amphetamine-fueled, cross-country drives like On the Road or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But what Midwestern Death Trip really is is a close study of the people and stories that comprise the genetic makeup of a region often dismissively referred to as flyover country.
“Sometimes I go out on a whim, looking for I don’t know what, but usually I find it anyway. I pull up a barstool, nod to my neighbor. Hello, stranger.” So begins Garvey’s odyssey into strange, out-of-the-way places scattered throughout her native Midwest, places like Cairo, Illinois that could be construed as undesirable or bizarrely unsettling like Spring Green, Wisconsin’s House on the Rock. She relays regional ghost stories, like the one about Seaweed Charlie, the pilot who crashed in Lake Michigan and whose body was never recovered, and attempts to convene with ghosts themselves at a spiritualist camp…though whose to say what’s real and what’s not? Garvey’s conversations with lumberjacks, mediums, and barflies reveal an openness to connection with people of varying backgrounds. With her own history of drug-dealing and abandoned media internships, she is far from one to judge, instead sidling right up next to people, listening and offering bits and pieces of herself in return. Though there’s no clichéd soul-baring, there are shared moments. And shots. Lots of shots. The regional microcosm belies an underlying belief: There’s something to be said for having a drink with a stranger.
Midwestern Death Trip hurtles you through its pages at a breakneck pace. It’s a speed-demon of a read, much like its errant narrator herself. I finished the book in a week. There was only one section around the middle when I feared Garvey had lost momentum where she drifts into an historical account of Helen Morgan, a scandal-plagued 1920s starlet. But just as I was beginning to drift into disinterest, the thread between Morgan and Garvey snapped into place: two lonely romantics reaching for connection. For Morgan, it manifested in various romances, but Garvey finds it in the tipsy, if not drunken, stories of strangers’ lives. We all want to feel a little less alone.
In this post-Covid era sodden with a constant stream of tiresome narratives that people are lonelier than ever, drinking less, and keeping their nose in their phone more, Garvey’s book assured me that debauchery and a flair for the mythic open road is alive and well—if you so choose. Get in your car and go somewhere. Meet people and talk with them. Strangers aren’t as strange as you may think. Or maybe they are, but hey, they’ll spin a damn good story.
Nowadays I live in New York City, over 800 miles from the shore of Lake Michigan I used to wander. In the pages of Midwestern Death Trip I found nostalgia for my native Midwest, reminded by the book’s own momentum of the electric energy propelled by a tornado-yielding summer storm and the feeling of eternity that comes from driving down a two-lane highway between seemingly endless cornfields under an empty blue sky. I’ve had my own aimless regional drives, like when my mom and I wound up in Kettle Moraine State Forest in Wisconsin for no other reason than we were bored and wanted to go somewhere. We’ve forgotten to wander in favor of optimization and in doing so are missing out on the serendipitous connections the open road can bring us. But it is still there.
Anyways, I’m going out for a cigarette. Anyone want to join?
