July - August 2006

Book Review: The Memory of Running

By Peter Engel

Don’t let the title fool you. This is a book about a bicycle road trip. And it’s a good one, too. Just give it time.

The “hero” and narrator of The Memory of Running, set in 1990, is 43-year-old Smithson “Smithy” Ide from Rhode Island. He’s 80 pounds overweight, borderline alcoholic, stuck in a dead-end job, can’t relate to women, and hasn’t fully dealt with the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam. Smithy has just suffered the double-whammy of tragedy: the death of his long-lost, mentally disturbed sister in Los Angeles and the deaths of his parents in a freak car accident. His depression is compounded by the realization that all the promise of his youth – his athleticism, positive attitude and enjoyment of life’s simplest pleasures – has been squandered.

To enjoy this book, you have to accept a certain amount of fantasy: that Smithy can awake one morning from a drunken stupor, get on a 1958 Raleigh three-speed, and finds himself riding from Rhode Island to Los Angeles. He makes no preparations, performs no training regimen (nor does he know what one is), has no plan, and no money. The Memory of Running is all about the ride, the adventures encountered along the way, and reconciliation with the past, as one person rediscovers about himself, spiritually and physically. This book is a jarring reminder that, just like when we were kids, only three things really matter: the road, the bike and the person pedaling.

Various Amazon.com reviews compare it and Smithy Ide with Ignatius J. Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces or Quoyle of The Shipping News. I’d prefer to interpret The Memory of Running as Kerouac’s On the Road for us gear heads. Maybe there’s a little of Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides in it. No matter. This is definitely an original and a very enjoyable read – especially if you need to take a long (perhaps unplanned) bike trip.

The Memory of Running, by Ron McLarty. Hardcover or paperback, 368 pages. Viking Adult, 2004.