In 2009, WBEZ Chicago's popular radio show This American Life aired “Rest Stop,” an episode in which nine reporters spent two days at Plattekill Travel Plaza – a rest stop on the New York State Thruway which, during the peak summer months, sees 10,000 Americans pass through its facilities every day. In a country with nearly 47,000 miles of interstate highway, Plattekill Travel Plaza is not unique, and that's precisely the point. It is, however, emblematic of America's “flat architectural economy of the country's sprawling highways” (3), as Elsa Court notes of America's spatial roadside makeup, in which an ostensible motel archipelago, pocked with coffeehouses, gift shops, and gas stations, dominates the nation.

Court's fascinating new book The American Roadside in Emigré Literature, Film and Photography, 1955–1985 takes this central paradigm of America's mobile culture and uses it as a lens through which to focalize the writings and artistry of leading émigré figures, from Nabokov to Hitchcock. Tapping into one of America's ideological mainstays, namely the social “tradition of being unable to stay put” (2), Court details across four chapters how the American roadside has been curiously narrated and represented in the works of so-called “outsider” émigré figures, typically white, male, and European, to whom dissecting the minutiae and banality of American life became a rite of passage across the twentieth century. Using the curious coinages that litter the study of America's mobile past and present, from Marc Augé's “supermodern” to the “ultra-democratic” nature of roadside “non-spaces,” Court's critical road trip wends its course through a textual–visual history of garish neon and backwater motels that alights at several conclusions, chief among which is that America is nothing if not the collected “metaphors of mobility” (179) which seem to define its identity in the provocatively named American Century.

The first of Court's “ethnographies of the American roadside in the postwar landscape” (18) is found via Vladimir Nabokov's perennially contentious novel Lolita (1955), a work in which the American roadside and its vast network of anonymous motels play an operative role in both Humbert Humbert's artful deception and his internal commentaries on America itself. Finding him a perverse and twisted twentieth-century retort to Alexis de Tocqueville, Court notes that Nabokov's protagonist navigates the “motel locus” of the novel in a manner that imitates social conformity in order “not to appear on the run” (33). She remarks upon how frequently “the abstraction of driving and the solitude of necessary stops” (44) are invoked in Nabokov's lurid road novel, and how Lolita and Humbert's various idiosyncratic anxieties at these roadside non-places, from the use of public bathrooms (associated with ambiguous sexual practice) to the pair's sleeping arrangements, conspire in creating a roadside space of insidious autovernacular properties.

The most compelling and engaging thread that Court pulls on here is the asymmetery between Humbert and Sal Paradise, the protagonist of Jack Kerouac's canonical asphalt elegy On the Road (1957). Humbert's disdain for the roadside idiom of the “Hitchhiking Man” marks a departure from the freewheeling optimism of Kerouac et al., who embrace the liberation of the roadside vagrant. For both, the architecture of the American roadside is a vital frame narrative; Kerouac's beats keep foot to gas and use motels and gas stations as markers of progress made whilst Humbert and Lolita frequently stop, pause, and reflect upon their transgressions, all but forgotten once they restart the engine.

Elsewhere in the book, Robert Frank's The Americans (1959) is considered within the context of Frank's “expatriate” status coupled with his Guggenheim-funded road trip through the United States, photographing cityscapes and rural communities that rattled by in a beautiful, melancholy blur beyond the windowpane. Court argues that Frank's distaste for photojournalism – “Those God-damned stories with a beginning, middle and end” – engendered his vignette style where, as Kerouac's famous introduction attests, a jukebox becomes a coffin becomes a grain elevator as if by flip-book magic. The Americans’ gallery of quotidian scenes, Court suggests, brings into focus the oil-slicked heart of America's mobile culture.

Court also turns to cinema as an exemplary medium for depicting the vagaries of the American roadside, finding in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) two narratively contrasting takes on the American roadside which become an unlikely double bill in their mutual exploration of loneliness, ennui and “lost places” (168). Whilst Hitchcock's protagonist finds, in the shadow of the old highway, a space for perverse transgressions, Wenders's career commitment both to the US and to road narratives more generally shows a contrastingly brilliant mess of neon Americana through which his lost characters wander. The result of both films, regardless of their thematic departures, is a centralized focus on the American roadside that seems both of America and yet estranged from the nation itself. In this interstitial space, an “otherworldliness” (111) takes hold.

The American Roadside takes the titanic leviathan of the American highway and, through careful unfurling of its ostensibly homogeneous network of routes, turnpikes, and rest stops, lays bare one of the most provocative and indeed recognizable American spaces. Above all else, how the “outsider” or émigré perceives this distinctly American topos is Court's concern and her chosen figures each contribute to a compelling theorization of America's “metonymical” capitalist bulwarks: gas stations, motels, and other “stopping places” (107). Court implores us, like our émigré forebears, to take pause and read the vacancy signs – these places are less empty than they appear.