‘You realise that most of the population of Harlowton was conceived in that park?’
‘Really? We had no idea.’
‘Well there ain’t much to do around here. So folks are either drinking in here, or else making out over in the park.’
‘Or doing karaoke in Ryegate,’ added Rachel.
‘Well yes, of course. But only on Fridays.”

To paraphrase Animal House, naive, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, boys. It does, however, make for an mostly entertaining account of two young Brits road-tripping through the United States. The drama and humor begins when these two lads (George and Mark) decide to buy an aging van dubbed “Josephine” from a suspiciously eager man in the backwoods, who declines to tell them that (1) the transmission is shot, (2) one of the tires isn’t quite the same size as the others, and as a consequence the entire chassis is being slowly deformed and (3) this is not a vehicle, it’s a moving scrapheap. Their mission: to drive from New York to California through America’s small towns, experiencing the real America. The $800 vehicle will eventually cost George over $4,000, and he will arrive in the Sierra Madre mountains in the winter, but it makes for an entertaining series of stories — at least, until his buddy Mark leaves and his girlfriend Rachel arrives.

I don’t know about you, reader, but some of my favorite stories involving my best friends involve times we made questionable decisions and, as a consequence, had little adventures. Like the time we got lost in a state park and decided to take a shortcut through a ‘shallow creek’, and — well, ended up thigh-high in something very much like quicksand, emerging on the other bank still very lost but now soaked and muddy to boot. Or the time we were hiking and got lost and emerged into the middle of a golf course, wandering through it and escaping via a very tony residential development where we were no doubt watched very carefully through blinds. Not Tonight, Josephine, is a book full of such misadventures, created by the fact that its storyteller and his comrade are young men whose confidence is outmatched only by their questionable judgement, made all the better by their being clueless out-of-place Brits who have never driven on the right side of the road before, let alone attempted navigating a vast rural landscape or the social graces of western bars. The first few weeks of travel are an exercise in frustration as Josephine breaks down on a regular basis, forcing them to pay for tows and repairs. These include replacing the red van’s back hatch with a bright yellow one from a Plymouth Voyager, which will attract no shortage of police attention. (The boys sleep in the vehicle and are frequently woken up in the middle of the night by cops who have nothing else to do but deem a dodgy-looking parked van as a clear and dangerous threat to the common good.) The boys drift from the north into the south from the midwest, then wander through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah to the Sierra Madre mountains. They frequently end their nights drunk, which costs them a bit in Las Vegas when they take full advantage of the free drinks and discover that said drinks can cost a surprising amount in gambling losses. Some crimes are committed on the way, like George deciding to spirit away a few blankets from one hotel room.

The book loses considerable interest after Mark returns to Britain, and George settles in a resort town for the winter, working in an inn as a cook and driving in the evenings for a delivery service that sounds rather like uber-eats but without the app part. At least part of the book takes places in the year 2000, given that Mark and George watch Bounce and Pay it Forward, both released that autumn. Although we get to encounter a few odd wintering-over characters during George’s solo period, there’s nothing like the constant friendly arguing of Mark and George, and when George’s girlfriend Rachel arrives, she’s not remotely entertaining – -at least, in this book. Going by George’s other books, the couple marry and have three kids while going on adventures like wandering around South America even more clueless than they are here. The book is largely entertaining, though — Bryson esque but without the grumpiness.