Three decades of American history underpin a quiet but charismatic drifter’s travels from the ‘60s to the ‘90s where he meets a series of characters as CONTINENTAL DRIFT questions the elusive nature of freedom. Creating the iconoclastic Gary, author G. Burton attempts to uncover the complicated nature of staying free in a world that demands conformity. Gary enters in the ‘60s, displaying both his malleability and his steadfastness as he helps his duplicitous uncle create an urban enclave for hippies and outcasts.
But soon, he’s traveling. Gary goes where the road takes him as Burton references Beat Poets, obscure economic thinkers and American interventionist foreign policy to mark his protagonist’s way. Living free within each moment, Gary hops trains and hitchhikes while steadfastly refusing the two-car-garage jail cell of the American Dream. Gary befriends hobos, businessmen, sailors and college students, each new friend coming with a backstory that helps build CONTINENTAL DRIFT into a primer on human foibles and ambitions. In Gary, the human struggle for purpose and meaning play out in small ways. His work as a boat-hand finds him confronting racism and bigotry. His stint as a lumberjack and enforcer lets him deflate the grotesque ambitions of a businessman. And Gary’s brief time as a day laborer brings out the kindness in a taciturn rancher.
Gary follows and leads but does both reluctantly and at times out of obligation. Burton seeks to portray a complicated man struggling always to be kind. He is a man learning as he goes, but wary of forming lasting attachments. Despite Burton referencing Kerouac’s Dean Moriarity, Gary most often resembles a kinder incarnation of The Fountain Head’s Howard Roark. Gary’s a man that insists on freedom to do as he pleases and struggles when boundaries appear – either from others or from himself.
Burton’s well-crafted prose weaves a story rich in detail, one that allows the 698-page tome to drift delightfully through time. Only at the end does the author falter, with Gary’s last encounter a forced compromise. Gary’s actions come across as false as the book closes abruptly, leaving the reader satisfied with the journey but not the destination.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT wishes to be a Great American novel. In Burton’s own foreword, he declares this book a literary swing for the fences, an attempt at a Great Statement on life’s lessons. Burton misses the home run, but does hit a triple. That’s a pretty good effort, and one most readers will appreciate.
~Greg Rideout for IndieReader