I’ve been everywhere, Johnny Cash sang (or sings still, in theubiquity of car rental ads, the incessancy of TV). I know how the manfeels. These last weeks have seen me in Los Angeles, Chicago, LosAngeles 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—withPortland (ME) coming the day after tomorrow.

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

What I do know is that people at readings—for a novel, no less—havebeen wanting to talk more about politics than they have at any of myother book tours. (This is my fifth one now—though it’s admittedly muchbigger than the ones I did for my other two books.) Maybe that’sbecause my novel is tangentially—and coincidentally—about some of themost severe weather of this campaign climate (race, gender, healthcare, privacy). But I suspect it’s about something else: people justwant 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—talkedabout wanting the country to change: fundamentally, necessarily,quickly. I found it striking, how often all different types of peoplejust came up and wanted to talk it out, to commiserate, to findreassurance from a stranger.

I’m not a political reporter, nor a pundit anywhere but in my livingroom, so I won’t attempt any grand statements or predictions. (Theymight be even likelier to be wrong than are the things professionalpundits write.) But the dissatisfaction all over the country ispalpable—one woman at a reading asked me: “Do you think the economywill turn around soon?” I explained that, as a novelist, I knew no moreabout that than any other lay person would. She kind of shrunk in onherself, like a child who is told that Santa is a fake, just a guy witha gut, a rented suit, a removable beard.

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

On a side note, I recently caught one of the Paul Simon concerts atthe Brooklyn Academy of Music (with David Byrne and a raft of Africanmusicians—a great geezer show); and while I know that nothing's morehigh-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.