Well, actually, there are three distinct threads in this book. The simple, straight-forward one, is the story of the narrator, travelling from Minneapolis to San Francisco along with his young son. The stated goal is to just enrich their lives and live along the road, either in motels, camps, or with friends. The unstated goal is to iron out what the narrator perceives as behavioural issues with his son.
While the narrator works as an editor of technical manuals now, he did, at some point in the past, work as a researcher and teach creative writing in English; and was actually quite prolific at it. But an introspective deep-dive into the nature of the subject he was teaching cause him to become obsessive, right up until he had a nervous breakdown. He built his life back up from there. The narrator refers to his pre-breakdown self as Phaedrus, after a greek philosopher. The narrator is trying to both forget, and remember Phaedrus. Or more realistically, he is trying to understand Phaedrus.
Which brings us to the third thread. This is a discourse of the study and findings of Phaedrus, on the philosophy of quality. The very attempt of defining quality leads to the eventual breakdown of Phaedrus. There was this classification of people into two groups: romantic and classical. The romantic school appreciates the beauty of things, while the classical school focuses on how the thing works. The world is not binary, though, and this grouping, and the names for this are quite nonsensical.
This book is not an easy read. The complex and layered musings on quality are hard to unravel, and the detail that the author delves into causes one to lose track as the threads keep shifting. There are several “quotable quotes” in the book, especially from the sections devoted to his meditation on the nature of quality. But that is just it. The serious, philosophical part is just quotes connected by mumbo-jumbo. The story-like narratives are pleasant enough, but unsatisfying. It took me a while to get through this book, after two aborted attempts.
I suppose there are people who love this disjointed writing. There have to be for the book to be the runaway best seller that it is. I am not one of those people.