The Walk Book by Sean Thor Conroe: book review
If you've read Sean Thor Conroe's debut novel, Fuccboi, the existence of The Walk Book is not new information for you. Within Conroe's work of autofiction, The Walk Book is shaped and agonized over. It is among the numerous things that protagonist, Sean, can't get right. The book is set in 2017, and this book has finally made it into the world, via Little Engines, in 2026, almost a decade later. Clearly, some things took different turns than expected.
The specter of that time can be felt in The Walk Book, and it is probably more interesting for it, having been collated so long after its original inception. Sean started the walk in 2014, and the book feels like both an account of the journey but also a conversation between a past and present self unfolding on the page. The book is largely constructed of diary entries and audio recordings from the walk itself. They're collated, dated entries of the things that happen on the road from Pennsylvania until he finally surrenders early into Colorado. He leaves without much of a plan, without a comprehensive set of supplies, and on a quest for external meaning. It is a narrative that's very familiar to the digital era but is also a tale as old as time. An urge to find the real after a series of personal disasters.
On the road, he is reliant on the help of others even as he aims to prove to himself a kind of self-sufficiency. He gets internally competitive with other guys he meets along the road. He pushes his body in unnecessary ways to prove something to himself. And it eventually all leads to collapse. He surrenders and calls his girlfriend to come pick him up and drive him the rest of the way to California. Most of the days are repetitive, fighting adverse weather conditions, debating whether to get a hotel room, and killing time in McDonalds. Still, the book is compelling and immensely readable. I read most of it in a single sitting, and I was moved. I liked the self-awareness even in the bits that didn't have the heavy hand of a voice from the future. The way he knows it's wrong to call and emotionally dump on Sophie and then bail when she tries to talk about her problems at work. The way he sometimes takes advantage of people. There's also random heartwarming bits. You know it's a mountain to nowhere, but there's still a lot to unearth along the way.
There's a turn in the narration when Conroe loses the audio recordings he had from the trip. It seems that as the journey progressed and burned him out that the material trail he left for his future self disappeared. This is where the hand of the writer curating from the future comes in. Larger reflections, memories of driving stretches of the road he walked years after on an assignment for a magazine holding his feelings on the walk, on the drive, and a few years later in the present. I thought there would be more of these reflections and more general literary postulating throughout the book, but I think the intentionality of the final product really works. There's a conversation within the conversation, which is what has stayed with me most in the months since reading it. I liked this multiple mirror conception of storytelling, the holding of many selves without having them encroach on one another. The final product is much more stripped back and less self conscious than Fuccboi, a book which The Walk Book both precedes and follows.
Despite being better than many books I've paid full sticker for, The Walk Book was born into the world in a kind of unconventional manner fitting of the eclectic text. It published this fall through Little Engines, an indie books and magazine outpost run by Adam Voith. The book is free, with the option to add a gratuity, and sold through the Little Engines website. I had mine shipped to my parents PO Box and hand delivered across the ocean when they came to visit. It is a well made book, as an object, and a satisfying read as a novel/memoir/whatever it's not on Goodreads so I can't tag check it but I believe Conroe calls it a novel. It doesn't really matter what the book is in the end. But it's also an interesting experiment in publishing, an alternative way of bringing something into the world in a quality manner circumventing the usual systems. And for that, I like it as well.
I like it as a book. I like it as an experiment. You can feel an evident growth in Conroe's writing. And, hey, there's really nothing to lose in giving it a go.
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