Long Walk Home is a mixture of Garrison Keillor, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Graham. It’s colloquial, self-effacing, funny, poignant, and true -- a non-religious religious book about fatherhood, grace, and the foolishness of trying to earn what was already freely given. Long Walk Home is about life with my two fathers, God and Ed, and about the challenge of relating to fathers whose language isn’t language.
Long Walk Home is a story about high school dating, Marine Corps boot camp, snake handling in eastern Kentucky, a cattle stampede at Mt. Rushmore, and a cycling world championship, all in a quest to please my fathers. It’s The Great Santini with this difference: It’s all true.
Long Walk Home challenges contemporary notions of fatherhood. This narrative demonstrates that the old fatherhood ought to be the new fatherhood. We ought to go back to the 50s, when father really did know best, to a time when a father wanted to raise a man, when fathers expected their sons to be tough, strong, and successful. They meant those sons to succeed, to stop the endless belly aching, and simply to do the job. They expected sons to be men, not drama queens. This is a story about what happens when the paternal paradigm shifts. It’s a story told not by the father, but by the son, a story that is instructive without being preachy. It lets the reader draw the obvious conclusions.
