I was a running boy. That's what our next door neighbour Ethel Sunman called me. I went from one place to another like a duck somebody was shooting at. I made beelines.

Smithson Ide is alone. Forty three years old, an alcoholic, overweight chain smoker, with a dead end job in quality control, and a stomach full of bullet holes from a tour in Vietnam, he has just lost his parents in a car accident. They died without ever finding out what happened to Smithy's sister Bethany, whose mental illness dragged her onto the streets years previously.

On first reading, Queenie got as far as the night after Mom and Pop's funeral, and nearly didn't pick up the book again. Not even when Smithy went off on one and cycled through Hope Valley and into the Wood River on his childhood Raleigh. The use of words like providence, hope and the inelegant dumping of the principal character into the dark wood (river) - a staple of most quests - were a little clunky. And the overwhelming self-pity and guilt of Smithy is wearying at first.

However, she is glad she picked the book up again. Smithy's Quest, as he cycles from Providence, Rhode Island to Los Angeles, first on his boyhood Raleigh bike, and then on a new Moto, bought for him in Providence, Indiana by a doctor who had him beaten up mistakenly, is one of the better American road trip novels she has read.

I think I'm on a Quest. My friend Norma says I'm on a Quest. I know it's strange. I used to be fat. Smithy tells a man who picks him up one night in Arizona.

Smithy explains that he is on his way to be reunited with Bethany, whose remains have been identified by dental records sent by Pop before he died. The man responds by sharing his own tragedy with his strange passenger. The novel is peopled with interesting characters who help put Smithy back together again, from 'old full and juicy', the disillusioned priest who provisions him for his journey, to Carl, the terminally ill flower grower who knocks him down in Indiana.

Smithy's Quest is also internal. The book flashes back and forth between Smithy's past and his journey. The inevitability of Bethany's disintegration hangs over Smithy's childhood, his present, and over us the reader. Her bouts of madness are presaged by her Voice, who only manifests itself to the boy, too young to save his sister and too small to be listened to.