Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American
Life by Tom Lewis, $27.95, Viking, ISBN 067086627X Car: A Drama of
the American Workplace by Mary Walton, 拢19.95, Norton, ISBN
0393040801
THE eeriest feature of the transport debate is the way we talk about cars as
though we never drove them and about roads as though we never travelled along
them. Transport is a big-number problem: it responds to objective analysis. But
us ants, confronted and confounded by the alien magnificence of our own barely
regarded hill, need a little individual perspective here鈥攁 little
thumb-printing.
In Divided Highways, a book based on a TV documentary, Tom Lewis
aims to make sense of humankind鈥檚 largest built structure, the US Interstate
network. Lewis鈥檚 history is precise, critical and humane. He analyses the
鈥渉ighway-man鈥� culture of the original Interstate engineers鈥攖heir rural or
small-town backgrounds, their regimented and limited education, and in many
cases their frank racism. But the testimony of such engineers鈥攄emonised
for social and environmental consequences of their schemes that they could never
have predicted鈥攊s poignant.
Advertisement
Lewis charts the rise and fall of the Interstate in the popular imagination,
from the enthusiastic welcome given to the 14-lane 鈥渕agic motorways鈥� of the 1939
New York World Fair to the indifference, scorn and embarrassment that greeted
its completion in 1991. In the end, what lets the book down is the Interstate
itself鈥攊ts comparative ordinariness when set against advances in
aeronautics, space travel and nuclear science. So what if you can see it from
space, if on the ground it is merely a 鈥渃onduit of national blandness鈥�?
In Car, journalist Mary Walton focuses on Ford鈥檚 1996 bid to rethink
the Taurus鈥攖ransforming it into a practically unengineerable jelly-bean on
wheels and 鈥渢he car that saved Ford鈥�. It鈥檚 promising territory: a group of
designers and engineers, more close-knit than any in Ford鈥檚 history, attempted
to shorten the design time of their new car from the usual four years to
Toyota鈥檚 target of 24 months, and 鈥渂eat the Camry鈥�.
But unlike Lewis, Walton is unwilling to let her protagonists have human
limits. Every player has to be a character, and every decision a confrontation.
Walton鈥檚 narratives are bombastic and melodramatic, and it鈥檚 quite impossible
for the reader to distinguish daily give-and-take from genuine crises. In this,
Ford itself must take some of the blame. Walton may talk rubbish about work at a
pilot plant being 鈥渟omething like combat duty for a soldier鈥�, but it was Ford
vice-president Ross Roberts who handed out American flags and camouflage helmets
during a sales drive.
Bewitched by such rhetoric, Walton eventually falls into a very gummy,
imprecise Ford-like despond. 鈥淎nd anyway,鈥� she concludes, intending irony but
missing, 鈥渋t was only a car鈥�.