I’ve been everywhere, Johnny Cash sang (or sings still, in the ubiquity of car rental ads, the incessancy of TV). I know how the man feels. These last weeks have seen me in Los Angeles, Chicago, Los Angeles again, New York, Los Angeles yet again, San Francisco, Menlo Park (CA),Oakland, Portland (OR.), Seattle, Bluffton (S.C.), St. Louis, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, New York again, and Boston—with Portland (ME) coming the day after tomorrow.

It’s been fascinating, in this time of ascending economic worry, to drive through all the different but similarly gentrifying downtowns, the abandoned or converted factories, and—ringing every city—the glossy office buildings done in the bland, tipped-over refrigerator style. I’m sure all you cartographic sociologists out there would know better than I just how much this list tends toward the blue end of our two-color political map. (When did Red-State/Blue-State get to be a shibboleth we all return to?)

What I do know is that people at readings—for a novel, no less—have been wanting to talk more about politics than they have at any of my other book tours. (This is my fifth one now—though it’s admittedly much bigger than the ones I did for my other two books.) Maybe that’s because my novel is tangentially—and coincidentally—about some of the most severe weather of this campaign climate (race, gender, health care, privacy). But I suspect it’s about something else: people just want to discuss the direction of the country—in a way they didn’t in, say, the summer of 2000, when my first book came out.

All the same, and perhaps not surprisingly in a season that finds the President at a 23 percent approval rating (and Congress even lower), everyone I’ve talked to—and I mean everyone—talked about wanting the country to change: fundamentally, necessarily, quickly. I found it striking, how often all different types of people just came up and wanted to talk it out, to commiserate, to find reassurance from a stranger.

I’m not a political reporter, nor a pundit anywhere but in my living room, so I won’t attempt any grand statements or predictions. (They might be even likelier to be wrong than are the things professional pundits write.) But the dissatisfaction all over the country is palpable—one woman at a reading asked me: “Do you think the economy will turn around soon?” I explained that, as a novelist, I knew no more about that than any other lay person would. She kind of shrunk in on herself, like a child who is told that Santa is a fake, just a guy with a gut, a rented suit, a removable beard.

The cab driver in St. Louis, the bookstore owner in Boston, the housewife who wanted her book signed in Minnesota—they all wanted to get into it, to unload, without even a preamble of small talk.

On a side note, I recently caught one of the Paul Simon concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (with David Byrne and a raft of African musicians—a great geezer show); and while I know that nothing's more high-school mawkish than quoting pop music lyrics, the words to "American Tune" keep looping in my head:

...we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it—I wonder what's gone wrong.