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THE GRAND TOUR

Adam O'Fallon Price

A bitingly funny, smart and moving road novel about two hapless lost souls—an alcoholic Vietnam veteran turned bestselling author, and his awkward, shy college student superfan—who form an unlikely connection on the world's most disastrous book tour.
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 in 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 depressive 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, 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. As they reach the end of the book tour, The Grand Tour ultimately becomes a moving tale of unlikely friendship that should catapult Adam O'Fallon Price into the company of such masters of All-American dyspepsia as Sam Lipsyte, David Gates and Walter Kirn. Adam O'Fallon Price received his MFA at Cornell University and was recently named the winner of Narrative’s latest short story contest. He has had work published in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, and Five Chapters. And his story, “Sandstorm,” (originally published in The Paris Review) made it to the list of Distinguished Stories in the 2014 Best American Short Stories. He lives with his wife in Iowa City, Iowa.
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Published 2016-08-09 by Doubleday

Comments

Price, meanwhile, is a witty and mordant writer with substantial largeness of heart. He's akin to Frederick Exley or a more breezy Malcolm Lowry... [The Grand Tour]is one of the most believable American novels of the past few years, a kind of On the Road for the lumpenproletariat.

Price offers up an acridly witty portrait of the artist in decline. We meet his protagonist, writer Richard Lazar, as he's shaken awake from an Ambien-and-vodka-induced coma aboard an airplane...From here, the novel becomes a road comedy of sorts, interspersed with excerpts from Lazar's novel, the core of which turns out to be as counterfeit as its creator. Price is a finely trained writer, and the novel recalls the late John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas in many respects. Read more...

...Together they embark on an alcohol-fueled adventure filled with embarrassing public pratfalls, funny and poignant barroom philosophy, and the uncomfortable realization that they actually need each other, even for just a few months....Still, the two make it to New York City, where a surprise ending caps off the story. Read more...

The Grand Tour is a beautifully written, darkly funny, and ultimately very moving novel about a road trip undertaken by two misfits, who end up much the better for their unlikely friendship in unexpected ways. Adam O’Fallon–Price deftly evokes the tender underbelly of cynicism, the despair and fear in misanthropy, and the fall into failure that lurks under success. A darker, tenderer, more twisted version of Wonder Boys.