Hitchin' by Alex Silberman

         Hitchin’ might be the best non-scholarly work to come out of Cambridge since the so-called ‘New England Summer’ literary revival of the late 19^th century. I, myself had always wanted to be a modern-day Kerouac — but Alex Silberman beat me to it (the fact that he actually went out “on the road” helped).

         I bought my copy in cash after drinks with the author at the Field, outside of Central Square.

         ‘That an $1.50 buys ya a cup a coffee.’

         It doesn’t hurt that I know a few of the characters in the book—and his depictions are spot-on. But really, Hitchin’ says something very deep, about life, about America—about youth, and its afterlife; how youth lives on in adulthood.

         As Alex hitchhikes across the country west he meets an assortment of weird and wild characters (perhaps none more so than himself) and like a Rorschach you can see what you want in it; to me some themes that pop up are the dichotomy between family (biological or otherwise) and loneliness. Despite the dire straits some are in or habits and lifestyles these are Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” who stop to pick up our author and detail their relationship problems, addictions, dreams, beliefs and wisdom. Silberman quotes a few aphorisms, or “advice” told him by a guy named Brandon, which could probably be stretched into a whole chapter, or maybe a book in its own right.

         Our protagonist lives among, and yet apart from all these people, maintaining individual self-consciousness while partaking in the flux of action and conversation. As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, ‘every artist is an “imitator,” that is to say, either an Apollonian artist in dreams, or a Dionysian artist in ecstasies, or finally…at once artist in both dreams and ecstasies; so we may perhaps picture him sinking down in his Dionysian intoxication and mystical self-abnegation, alone and apart from the singing revelers, and we may imagine how, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the inmost ground of the world, is revealed to him in a symbolical dream image.’* 

        

         As we meet ‘the young the old and what have you with other displaced characters’ and more through ‘different worlds not colored in such Nuevo modernist, veiled progressive, technocratic finery’ we see another side of the American Dream. If Silberman cannot change the world he seeks to live outside of it, and yet right in the heart of it at the same time. Still, without the corporations he reviles who would manufacture the cars that give him a lift, who would ship the cardboard boxes from which he makes his signs, and who would operate the fast-food joints he stops in to use the bathroom?

         Alex inhabits a world (call it Cambridge, call it the second decade of the 21^st century) where people are defined by, and hung up on, their sexuality—therefore, as many do I think, he accepts gays and transsexuals unquestioningly but is adamant in his own heterosexuality, defining himself in the process but it is palpable his lonely lust on the road as he heads west throughout the first part of the book, ‘Momentum from point A to point P, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.’

         In many ways though, he is just a normal guy—the first half of Hitchin’ is really the story of the people he meets on the way; very strange characters at times caught up in all sorts of situations. He judges the system, not individuals—he leaves that to the reader. Still there is often enough the sense of a struggle in these lives between sin and redemption. They change their lives, overcome addiction, deal with infidelity, return to or run from children, spouses, obligations and home:

         and it’s to home, ultimately, that Alex must return. The Pacific Ocean is his destination, his goal—once he reaches it he seems devoid of purpose, flitting about impulsively looking for connection, settling for shallow sex. It is at this point in the book that we confront Silberman himself, without the phantoms of all these other lives whose stories seem transiently fascinating. And here, the writing itself takes a different turn. Silberman’s narrative is defined by naiveté side-by-side deep wisdom; his prose at times simple and matter-of-fact, bordering on social-media-English, yet achieves true brilliance in unique phrasing and often enough is profound in its very simplicity.

         Hitchin’ does not answer the question, “What’s out there?” so much as it raises new questions about what’s inside and between us, how we define ourselves and relate to each other in this modern world where connection is a click away and yet the people we live with may be farther from us than the other side of the country.  

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-G.T. Evans

*trans. Walter Kaufman

Aside from the Nietzsche all quotes are taken from Hitchin’