Reading Freely

When he was twenty-three, Michael Mohr read On the Road and decided to pursue the life of Sal Paradise himself. He hit the road for a life of drinking and adventures, but by the end of his twenties had lost enough to alcohol that he went sober and began writing. There’s something immediately captivating about that—young people reading a book, feeling it deeply, and being so fired up they want to throw themselves into the fray. Mohr is a reader who feels and writes with intensity, and like his favorite authors he is not one who can be thrown into a box — tidily labeled and dismissed. I happen to be very fond of those authors, myself — authors whose feelings and thinking cut across party lines, whose thought is honest and earnest and not prepackaged. They make me sit down to truly consider them, and that’s always a more rewarding experience than reading the latest political polemic that says ‘Hoo-ray for our side’.

This work is a mix of essays on politics, culture, and literature. While it was politics that first drew my attention to Mohr’s writing (he’s a lifelong Democrat who hates the way the party has gone since Obama retired), the latter third is all about different authors and the role of their art in unearthing truths about the human experience. These essays are extremely varied: to pick three at random, there’s a critique of the Democratic party’s platform and candidates in the 2024 election, a rumination on how Alcoholics Anonymous is not monolithic, and a tribute to the life of Charles Bukowski. I especially enjoyed the literary essays as someone who takes books and authors seriously — especially authors like Bukowski or Ed Abbey, unique personalities. Reception to the political section will vary on feeling, I think: as a former college progressive who became disaffected and then bitter and contemptuous toward the Democratic party during the same period Mohr is writing about here, I was all on-board for their getting roughed up here. That’s not because Mohr is a conservative or libertarian writer; he says he’s never read anything from conservative writers, and he has a visceral contempt for Trump. He realizes, though, that Trump’s anti-elite messaging works because the Democratic Party has become elitist and condescending, and that the legitimate needs of voters across demographics are not being met by business as usual. (The fact that Trump picked up voters in every demo in the last election except for black females is telling on that part, but I strongly doubt the Dems will take it seriously.)

In both his political and literary writing, Mohr reveals himself to be the kind of writer America used to produce amply: the impassioned individualist who hates tribal thinking, and not simply the other side’s tribal thinking. He doesn’t want himself or any other serious writer or person to be put in a box and stored away neatly. I was reminded of how when I was studying Ed Abbey that I realized Cactus Ed was too unruly for the easy label of ‘environmentalist’. The real man was far more complex and interesting — and contradictory! This collection, too, is complex and interesting. I think Mohr’s enthusiastic reading does have oversights , but I admire and appreciate his active attitude toward learning. When people accuse Trump of being a new Hitler, he reads a biography of Hitler; when people talk about cultural Marxism, he reads a biography of Marx, and in both occasions he writes down his thinking. He doesn’t just react to identity politics as shallow: he creates an essay on the Buddhist idea of no-self and how it applies. I think that kind of dedicated digging-in is fairly rare these days: we find it so easy to accept other people’s summary judgements.

All told, this was a fun collection to read through — sometimes easy, sometimes prickly, but always interesting…and more important, real.