E-Mail This Article to a Friend Travel channels Literary road trips take many forms on this summer’s pages BY J.L. JOHNSON

Somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, the drugs will begin to take hold. Somewhere along the line there’ll be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl will be handed to you. For those who seek pure escapism when they open a book, little can rival the somewhere of the literary road trip, crisscrossing physical and psychological landscapes as the characters chase their next great love, their next high, their holy grail in whatever form it takes, somewhere, out there.

This summer brings a number of such stories, both fictional and true, that range all over the map in terms of subject, setting, and tone: a music writer embarks on a coast-to-coast death trip; a shy psychoanalyst hunts for virgins along China’s back roads; British royals set out to reclaim their former colonies by parachuting naked into New Jersey; strangers chase lonely, impossible dreams, in and out of cars. The one thing these wanderers share is their abandonment of the predictable, the known; they lay themselves bare to chance. For that, as John Steinbeck reminds us, is the only way to travel, in the end: "[A]ll plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless ... we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

Killing Yourself To Live: 85% of a True Story (Scribner, July) by Chuck Klosterman. It’s clear by the end of this book, which recounts a real-life cross-country pilgrimage to see where famous and less-so musicians met their demise, that Spin magazine writer Klosterman is a little worried he’ll be compared with Nick Hornby (for hyper-referential pop-culture themes and a tendency to use music for relationship metaphors) or Elizabeth Wurtzel (for hyper-referential pop-culture themes and a tendency to note which CD you’re using to snort coke). But Killing Yourself To Live is better compared with gonzo chef Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: just as the all-gourmet, no-bullshit Bourdain can make such dishes as pig’s cheeks and grilled ox heart seem almost palatable, so too can Klosterman convincingly argue for enjoying Rod Stewart, KISS, and the Olive Garden. A Midwest native, he treats his late subjects — which include Duane Allman and Sid Vicious — often with humor or exasperation, but no hipster snobbery. After visiting the site of the Station nightclub fire, in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where so many died at a Great White concert, Klosterman writes that "what makes the Great White tragedy sadder than it logically was [is that] one can safely assume none of the 100 people who died at the Station that night were trying to be cool by watching Great White play 20-year-old songs.... I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it."

As Klosterman logs the 6000-plus miles — with many digressions and side trips — from New York’s Chelsea Hotel to the former site of Seattle’s most notorious greenhouse, fans of his Fargo Rock City (2002) and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2004) will be familiar with the self-deprecating humor and the rat-a-tat movie and music references. But Killing Yourself To Live is necessarily darker than his first two books, as he ponders not only "why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing," but why it is that love, death, and rock and roll can sometimes feel like exactly the same thing.

Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch (Knopf, June) by Dai Sijie. Having whetted readers’ appetites with the short, sweet novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which topped the bestseller lists when it came out in 2002, Dai Sijie returns this summer with a main course: an intricately plotted, full-length tale that mixes romance, adventure, and psychoanalytic theory against the backdrop of modern-day China. Sijie’s hero is Mr. Muo, a disciple of Freud who returns from years abroad determined to spread the benefits of dream analysis in his homeland — and to save the woman he loves, Volcano of the Old Moon, from her prison sentence. Bookish and "bereft of charm and good looks," Mr. Muo makes for an amusing update on Don Quixote: "Muo the incorruptible, Muo the true, Muo the knight in shining armor! Invoking the name of his own Dulcinea, he pictured her in his mind as he pedaled along the bumpy road just ahead of his dream-logo banner."

To win his love’s release, Mr. Muo must find and deliver a virgin to the judge overseeing the case. His quest will send him by road and by rail into a domestic workers’ market, a mortuary, an insane asylum, a wildlife sanctuary, and a suburban hotel, among other unlikely spots. In the end, it will also send him deep into the strange terrain of his unconscious desires. More dreamlike than real, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch has given its hero excellent traveling companions in Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, whose work suggests that self-exploration is the most unpredictable — and rewarding — journey we can take.