Ah, yes, the grand European tour: floating at leisure through beautiful countryside, quaint villages and bustling cities; dining on delicious foods and drinking fine wines; spying a castle or three; luxuriating in the discoveries and pleasures of a world steeped in historical presence.

Except.

There are a lot of exceptions in Michael N. McGregor‘s 2025 novel The Last Grand Tour, in which an American expat named Joe Newhouse, fresh off his wife’s abrupt disappearance with another man, gets back to his flailing business as a tour guide, taking a group of Americans on a winding trip in his second-hand Ford bus from Germany and through the Alps to Austria and finally Venice. It’s the trip of a lifetime – except.

This is not an ordinary vacation tour but a trip by the principles in a successful video-game company run by a fellow named Gerhard, who doesn’t show up, although his wife, Tonia, does, and Joe takes notice.

On the road, as others in the group set out on their own sometimes surly ways, an unexpected alliance grows between Joe and Tonia, a furtive and perhaps forbidden groping toward intimacy and the possibility of joy. Yet there is also a restlessness to all of these characters and to the tale itself, a sense that things are going wrong amid this splendid scenery; that this band of travelers is moving not toward the thrill of discovery and fulfillment but away from happiness, caught in a web of their own inescapable being.

“The lure of travel, I thought, is only the lure of illusion, the mistaken belief that in a new country with different people and different ways, we can escape the confines of ourselves,” Joe muses at one point. “The problem is, wherever we go, we take ourselves along.”

Not just ourselves, but our memories, which mingle with the memories of old Europe good and bad, including some jarring encounters with the resonating realities of Hitler’s hold on the continent and its human cost. There are hidden tunnels with secrets, and the ruins of a concentration camp; Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castle pops up as a kind of symbol of what can go wrong, or shift the ground, as in this passage:

Sponsor

“‘Isn’t it wonderful to think about the past?’ The words were Rudy’s. He said them loudly, in a lighthearted tone that let you know right away he wasn’t planning on stopping there. …

“‘A couple of days ago,’ Rudy said, ‘I would have said you were right. The past is the past. Pay attention to now. Do what you came here for and go home. Then I was standing there in Munich, wasting the morning … standing there wanting only to get home … and I remembered about Dachau. Remembered it wasn’t far away.’

“‘You didn’t have to go there.’

“‘No, Felicity, I didn’t have to go. But when I got to thinking about it, how could I be that close and not go? That wouldn’t have been right, would it? … No, that wouldn’t have been right.'”

McGregor, a professor emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Portland State University who now lives in Seattle, writes with a controlled restlessness and sense of impending disaster, leavened with dry humor and wit. His story wants to be a thing of beauty except that it can’t help poking in the perilous places, and that fragile balance of dualities keeps it intense and interesting from beginning to end. This is no Hallmark movie script: It comes with a couple of surprise hard twists that seem, in retrospect, like slices of the downside of reality.

Turns out, the grand tour is no picnic beneath a sunny sky. It is, however, a well-told tale of the messiness of life.

***

Sponsor

McGregor will be back in Portland on Tuesday, May, 20, for the launching of his second book of the year, the memoir An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life, in a 6 p.m. conversation with literary podcaster David Naimon at Broadway Books, 1714 N.E. Broadway.

In an email, McGregor describes Island as “a much more personal book: a memoir based on the two months I spent in total solitude on the island of Patmos in Greece forty years ago. After exploring that experience and how it changed my life, the book looks at some of my later encounters with solitude, including my return to Patmos last year to spend two weeks alone and see how four decades had changed my views of the island, solitude, and myself.”

Willy Vlautin wins Joyce Carol Oates Prize

Willy Vlautin, the Oregon musician (Richmond Fontaine, The Delines) and novelist (Lean on Pete, The Motel Life, five others), hit the literary jackpot recently as one of two winners of this year’s Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He and fellow winner Jennine Capó Crucet of North Carolina each will receive $50,000 and will have residences this fall at the University of California, Berkeley. Vlautin’s most recent novel, The Horse, was a finalist in this year’s Oregon Book Awards. ArtsWatch’s Karen Pate wrote here in March about Vlautin’s career and his nomination for the Oates award.

Brian Doyle’s “Mink River” hits the stage

Brian Doyle, longtime editor of the University of Portland’s excellent Portland magazine and for many years a leading literary figure in Oregon before his death in 2017, may well be best remembered for his lush novel Mink River — as Edwin Battistella describes it in The Oregon Encyclopedia, “the story of a fictional town on the Oregon Coast told in the sometimes mystical voices of its struggling inhabitants.” The novel is a densely packed poetic narrative, dripping with the love of language and as sensory as fresh raindrops on a rose bush in full bloom.

You can read Mink River, of course, as many Oregonians and others have. And from 5 to 10 p.m. Monday, May 19, you can also sit in the aptly named Brian Doyle Auditorium in Dundon-Berchtold Hall at the University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., and listen to a host of onstage performers reading it for you. Portland director Jane Unger has brought together a 16-member cast including such stalwarts as Gavin Hoffman, JoAnn Johnson, Dana Millican, Pat Patton, Paul Susi and Ashley Song to bring the town’s inhabitants to life from a stage adaptation by Myra Platt.

The performance is free, and it might be a good idea to show up a little early to grab a good seat. One more important detail: The reading is broken into two parts, with a half-hour dinner break between. Pack your own, or hit a nearby noshery for a bite to go.

Sponsor

Ken Yoshikawa, Kora Link, and R.L. Routh’s  “Songs for the End of the World”

Speaking of the Oregon Book Awards and words onstage, Portland poet, playwright, and actor Ken Yoshikawa, whose play From a Hole in the Ground was a finalist for this year’s Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama, has another show going up this weekend. Songs for the End of the World opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 16, and has two more performances, at 5 p.m. Sunday, May 18, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 24. All three performances are at Now Serving, a pickleball court (!) at 330 S.E. Sixth Ave., Portland, and are produced by Basement Stair Collective.

Rhythm, of course, is key to language, and as Willy Vlautin (see above) illustrates, music and literature are closely connected — and theater, which combines literature and movement, is, too. Songs for the End of the World is a one-person show, performed by Kora Link, who also is the show’s composer.

What’s it about? Here’s what R.L. Routh, Basement Stair Collective founding member and the show’s director, has to say:

“Just for a little while, let the overwhelm hit. Scream, cry, blast your music too loud to handle, blame yourself, blame your boss, and curse every billionaire who ever lived. Then let the Quiet in. Remember that, unlike this character who is alive onstage for 45 minutes, we are not the last one left. We still have each other. Isn’t that something?”