Ambitious and earnest. In this westward journey, Pocock seeks not fortune, success, or survival, but connection, in all senses of the word: for her own sake but also, more urgently, as a balm for America’s pervasive ills to which her bus ride grants her a front-row seat.
It is a testament to Pocock’s subtlety and skill that Greyhound can do so much without flashing neon signs over the various points it makes. Transitioning with deceptively light grace through its many significant subjects, the book flows like scenery past a windshield. It encompasses inner journey, feminist critique, engaging travelogue, examination of literary predecessors ... Lyrical and clear-eyed at once, Pocock has reinvented the road-trip genre for a new age.
It uses its ecological consciousness to direct readers’ attentions to the natural world, thoughtfully probes the boundaries of its own awareness, and honestly struggles to achieve a comfortable sense of place ... It ends with a pledge to continue cultivating a sense of belonging and a feeling that, for Joanna Pocock, 'home' may involve a set of ongoing practices rather than something she achieves once and for all.
Pocock could sound curmudgeonly, and occasionally she rose-tints the past, but she stops her book from being swamped in pessimism by writing vividly about places, authoritatively about environmental emergencies, and letting her sympathy for people shine ... I didn’t want the ride to end because, for all the difficulties Pocock encounters and the suffering she observes, there are moments of 'a strange sort of transcendence' ... Rigorous and rewarding.
These experiences provide fascinating material for a writer as non-judgmental as Pocock ... This ambitious book asks important societal questions and is astute in its depictions of public living.
Although terrific in conveying the often-surreal dialogue around her, [Pocock] rarely participates ... Disillusionment is a hallmark of the great American roadtrip story, but it must be accompanied by joy, adventure, and above all, individuals ... Unfortunately, Pocock’s journey...was subsumed by the existence of so much suffering ... In the end, although she so beautifully conveys the bleakness that is our world, there is not enough humanity in Greyhound to merit her sorrow.
