I, Joseph here, with our third excerpt from the Alice isn't that novel.

Bernard Hamilton left for San Francisco immediately after graduating from college.

He had no job set up there, no friends or acquaintances waiting for him.

He had never even been to San Francisco.

But youth is the time for great leaps of faith, and so he packed everything he owned into

his corolla and started the drive from Connecticut because he believed that to experience America

is to experience its distance.

He called his mother every night because she was worried he would be murdered and he

was willing to humor her silly fears.

He was driving on major highways, staying in budget chain hotels with free coffee in the

lobby.

This was transit, not hedonism, and lots of people do it every year.

He was no different from lots of people.

Of course lots of people get murdered every year, but he thought he was different from those

people.

For reasons he could not have articulated because the idea that nothing horrible could ever

happen to us personally exists not in our thoughts, but in the base of our next.

Bernard told his mother about the great lakes, how Lake Michigan looked like the ocean, how

he couldn't see the far ashore even from the high floor of an office building in Chicago

that he snuck into because he couldn't afford any of the viewing platforms or skyscraper

restaurants.

He told her about the flats of the Midwest, how there were no physical landmarks to divide

...