Andrew Struthers, Around the World on Minimum Wage

Even though it borrows some of its structure from Samuel R. Delany's novel Dhalgren, and mimics elements of Victorian memoir (and Victorian travel writing), and belongs to the crowded genre of nostalgic travel memoir, there's just nothing in the least like Andrew Struthers' Around the World on Minimum Wage. It is, in a word, bonkers, and therefore perfect for a great many readers who might never find their way to this book. Once again, I find myself hoping that a book I've appreciated might end up with a long tail.

How to explain it?

Well, Struthers is a character and a half, possibly more than that, and this book was written in midlife on the verge of eviction (according to "Author's F____bookᵀᴹ Page," which falls somewhere between an acknowledgements section and an apologia, and almost concludes the book) about the dizzying vagaries of his 20s, more or less.

Struthers travels around the world on the cheap, often in pursuit or the company of his beloved Guinevere, with notable stops in Tibet, Japan, Russia, and Tofino. His adventures are in general beyond belief, except that you believe them, or at least I did. When you're my age and lived even with intense mildness through the same years that Struthers did, you know what could happen in the 80s. (It's a bit like David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, in that sense.)

My willingness to believe applies even if many of these events didn't happen, to be clear. This book may be all truth (impossible! maybe? impossible!), but the quotidian's hardly the point. What, an alien species will one day need to reconstruct humanity and Earth, and they'll have to do it entirely through the lens of Around the World on Minimum Wage? I found it hard to care, in such a self-conscious, -ironizing, and -deprecating book, whether the details were correct, but the above-referenced F____bookᵀᴹ Page tells of his efforts toward accuracy both factual and emotional, so feel free to read it as a historical artifact if you'd like.

The journey is the point, though, and it's a journey that's inconceivable without its limping, gimbling, politically complicated, love-addled narrator that I couldn't help trusting at the very moment that I was rolling my eyes the hardest. Whether it's avoiding arrest because he's drawing pictures during a riot in Tibet, skipping a Japanese customs search through borrowing a fancy suit, or visiting his grandmother in Scotland, I was with Struthers, even (especially?) when it was something I had entirely to imagine.

Oor Wullie, Idi Amin, the Dalai Lama, Mathias Rust, Reagan, a rogues' gallery of Auld Tofino: you owe it to yourself to give this bewilderment a try, because you might find yourself loving the thing. And if you don't, I bet you know exactly which person in your circle you should pass the book on to.