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Travels with Alice
by Calvin Trillin

The main reviews page called it "moderately funny." Find out why. Three and a half stars out of five. This review was originally done as an English assignment.

Review

Travels with Alice was a little bit slow for me, but other than that it was quite enjoyable. Calvin Trillin cannot compete with the likes of Dave Barry, Jack Handey, and Gary Larson in terms of humor, but he’s probably up there. He starts out with humorous anecdotes from family car trips as a child. His antics about having to maintain a “full border alert in the back seat” to ward off “his sister with an expansionist back-seat policy” are hilarious. Later on, he focuses on travels with his wife and two teenage daughters.

This book is never boring, but it definitely doesn’t make you desperate to find out what happens next. After all, there’s no plot whatsoever. It just takes you from city to city, country to country, and occasionally back to old favorites where you learn about what new adventures more visits bring. I would recommend this to someone who wants a slow-paced guide to various locales infused with a good chunk of humor. This is not a book for someone who needs constant suspense; unless you’re just someone who is in desperate need of a good guide to taureaux piscine, in which case you should definitely pick this book up right away.

Summary

Travels with Alice by Calvin Trillin is a book about Calvin’s travels around the world – from Lucca, Italy to the Champs-Élysees, France. The book begins with a humorous recounting of his many travels as a child, detailing both his sister Sukey’s back-seat expansionist policy and how proud his family was about covering ground. Next up was a briefing on some of his earliest trips with Alice. With her, they tended to stay in one place for longer periods of time. Alice, you see, had a “weakness” for romantic spots.

Later in the book, Trillin details long stays in France, Spain, Italy, and more. In his hometown of New York, he describes his Canadian friend Fraser’s embarrassing loss to a chicken at a game of Tic Tac Toe. In France, he learns about taureaux piscine, in which the object of the game is to be in a tiny pool at the same time as a bull, and babyfoot, which Americans may know as Foosball or Table Soccer. In Spain, he attempts to learn Spanish with help of his daughter Abigail, while in Italy he describes how Lucca is a city made for hanging around and wonders at how many foodstuffs Sicilians can duplicate in pure marzipan.