By MICHAEL WEISS
Last updated: 2:17 am
July 6, 2008
Posted: 2:00 am
July 6, 2008
Here's a race only two idle TV writers could devise: Start at the same point (in this case Los Angeles), travel in opposite directions, traverse every line of longitude on the globe, amass a few anecdotes, do it all without the use of planes, helicopters or hot air balloons, then award whoever returns first a bottle of vintage Scotch (in this case the admirably selected 1969 Kinclaith).
The premise behind Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran's new book "The Ridiculous Race" is a good one. The execution, though, is all over the place.
Of the two racers, Hely, who writes for the animated series "American Dad," is the one with a winning wanderlust and a studied romantic's love of the "old-fashioned grandeur" of travel by boat, rail and wild horse. It helps that he chooses to head west on a cargo boat filled with a German above-deck crew, and a Filipino below-deck one, and a haul of mostly empty containers heading back to Shanghai to be refilled with Asian goodies for American consumers - a "physical demonstration of the trade deficit," as he puts it.
Hely consults the esteemed Sinologist Jonathan Spence on what to expect in China: "constant change," and so we're not surprised to find that the city of Lianyungang resembles an early sketch of a metropolis, sort of a ghost town in reverse, with streets that "are mostly theory." And the question to ask at a nomadic Mongolian bivouac is "Do I pay roaming fees out here?" Hely notes, "In the middle of the night I hear [my guide] talking on his cell phone, and in between Mongolian syllables I heard him say 'extended drive.' When I asked him about it the next morning, he explained he'd been giving tech support to a friend trying to install a new computer."
Hely can sound like P.J. O'Rourke: "Soviet planners have a bad reputation. They deserve a way, way worse reputation," he writes while glimpsing a concrete wasteland out of his cabin window on the famed Trans-Siberian Railroad. And "Rimini . . . seems to be the Jersey shore of Italy. That was surprising, because I'd thought the Jersey shore of Italy was the Jersey shore."
Chandrasekaran, who writes for "My Name Is Earl," sounds bored throughout - and he cheats. He tries to handcuff his rival before the starting pistol goes off and then he actually flies to almost every destination on his itinerary. In Mexico, he searches for a jetpack that Google might have told him won't take him across a wading pool let alone the Atlantic. And most of his jokes are the kind that only a laugh-track would appreciate: "I never read 'The Art of War,' but there's probably nothing in there on never letting your opponent see you in your underwear. If not, I bet that subject is covered in Sun Tzu's sequel, 'The Attire of War.' "
Of the pair, Chandrasekaran seems to prefer holidays in hell (he does the Middle East for two weeks and forms some after-school special opinions about the Arab-Israeli conflict), but I wonder whether cataloguing Cambodian atrocities in the late 20th century should end on a dud like this one: "One gets the sense that there wasn't a foosball table at Khmer Rogue headquarters." Personally, I like my gallows humor to have humor.
The Ridiculous Race
by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran
Henry Holt & Co.
