More than 60 years ago, John Steinbeck packed a camper truck and his poodle, Charley, and lit out to rediscover a country he feared he’d lost touch with. Lauren Hough’s Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America (Pantheon; June 2026) takes the same dare, pointing a refurbished, ramshackle 2001 Dodge van away from Austin and onto the open road. Her husky mix Woody rides shotgun as both companion and accomplice, the whole trip conceived in the long shadow of Travels with Charley.
Hough is quick to remind us she’s no Steinbeck — unless, as she puts it, the Nobel laureate had a secret past as a six-foot-tall lesbian and Air Force vet. The disclaimer is funny, and it also digs into the inquiry at the center of the book: the view of America you see when you drive through it depends on who’s behind the wheel. Hough has spent her life on the side of the road most travel writers blow past, and she carries that vantage into every gas station, diner, and auto shop she encounters.
Hough talks to people across every imaginable political divide, and rather than flattening them into types, she insists on their full dimensionality. The forgotten places she drives through — left-behind towns, people who are largely invisible to the rest of the country — are rendered with generosity. She lets people be contradictory, frustrating, tender, wrong, and human. She has no use for the easy contempt road books so often serve up, the writer collecting characters to feel superior to. The book’s deepest conviction is that most of what divides us is manufactured, downstream of an obscene wealth disparity that pits neighbor against neighbor. Strip that away, and what’s left is a country full of people who are ultimately recognizable to one another.
Woody steals nearly every scene he’s in. A husky mix has opinions, and Hough lets him keep them: He is co-pilot, sounding board, foot warmer, and the one creature in the van with no stake in anybody’s politics. He is also the book’s best diplomat. People who would hesitate to approach a stranger in a beat-up van will cross a parking lot to meet a dog, and again and again Woody is the thing that opens the door Hough then walks through; the accomplice doing half the work of the trip without knowing it. Hough’s love song to him is also an elegy, an acknowledgment that the trip itself is a way of holding onto something before it goes.
The processing of loss runs underneath all of it like a road under fog. Anyone who has loved a dog knows that to write about them is to write about unconditional love, and also mortality. You sign up for the magic of being loved by them, and you sign up, in advance, for losing them. I spent much of my time reading Monster of a Land with my feet tucked under my own beloved road trip companion, Numa: a 165-lb Newfoundland who has spent hours in my car as I drive along the East Coast between Maine and Philly. To travel with a dog is to be reminded, mile after mile, that you’re on the clock: that this incredible creature is aging faster than you — that the days you’re banking are days you can already feel running short. Hough never spells this out, but the feeling runs through the book like a current.
The heaviness of it all is transformed by Hough’s delivery: she is genuinely, helplessly funny. She makes you laugh on one line and guts you on the next. Her observations are razor-edged but never cruel. She brings a queer, working-class lens to a genre that has too often belonged to comfortable men, and the result reads less like a travelogue than like the most profound kind of American music: a protest song and a love song at once.
The book is honest about loss: trips you spend your whole life talking about but keep deferring, the next-summer and one-of-these-days that quietly become never, until the people and the dogs you meant to bring along are already gone. Monster of a Land is a generous book that never turns naive. It’s a book about looking, really looking, at a country and its people, and refusing to write any of them off. It is also a book about the trips we don’t take, and the cost of waiting. Read it, and you may find yourself reaching for your keys.
Elizabeth Austin’s writing has appeared in Time, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, Narratively and others. She is currently working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom. She lives outside of Philly with her two children and their many pets. Find her at writingelizabeth.com and on Instagram @writingelizabeth
