Off Route (Novel)
By Rick Levin
GladEye Press, Springfield, 2026
$20.95 at Amazon
By Daniel Buckwalter
The old copy-editor dog inside me recently stirred and asked for some work. Happily, I found some for him.
This dog has been quiet of late, no longer sniffing out Oxford commas or double spaces. He no longer is trying to untangle snarled run-on sentences. His tail no longer springs to attention with the benevolent and earnest desire to ask, “May I introduce you to the period? It’s a punctuation mark that can be your best friend.” No, the old copy-editor dog inside me is mostly content to let the kids walk the fields of journalism gold and create their own memories.
Yet the old dog in me was awakened on a recent summer day by Off Route, the debut novel of Springfield resident Rick Levin, a noble-hearted and sometimes curmudgeonly man who champions the working class and the downtrodden, and who has no fear of throwing spheres at the ruling class.
Levin did two stints at — and I say this with adoration — that far-left radical commie rag Eugene Weekly (trust me, it has been called worse, and it is a badge of honor to all who have served and continue to serve that paper).
His second stint overlapped the first 18 months of my seven-plus years at EW, and I came to enjoy our talks about sports, class distinctions and much more. When I bump into him, which is not often enough, I will certainly stop what I’m doing to say hello.
Off Route came out this year, and it is everything I — and anyone who knows him — would expect from Levin. There are long sentences that never get tangled (I marvel at that), and trips to Google to search for words that I have, at best, barely heard of, and they all make sense. His writings for the paper were often inspiring, and much of that has transferred to the novel.
As the main character in Off Route notes, “Not to gloat but, on paper, my cultural résumé is fairly sophisticated. College educated, well-read, travel abroad, not afraid of foreign movies, etc. You know, a real citizen of the world.” That’s Rick Levin.
Still, it is his working-class roots that shine brightest in Off Route — something, I think, he relishes even more. He is forthright about it in the novel, and he is brave in the sense that he is not afraid to have his characters expose their knotted tracks of anxiety on the page. Some of it is painful, and he writes it all with his heart on his sleeve.
Levin left EW in early 2020 take a bus driving job with Lane Transit District, and it is here where the novel begins its 217-page trip. The bus is a gathering space for the proletariat. Levin said it aloud at the time he left EW, and the main character proudly declares it early in the novel: “I drive the bus for the people.”
In the author’s note, Levin writes that Off Route is fiction, yet I recognize so much of the author in the pages. The novel is Levin to the core.
He writes of tales about love and lust, of the fragility of substance recovery, of the richness of a working-class upbringing and of the tone-deaf policies of the bus company’s management team and the toxic drama it produces. And there is, of course, the angst of driving a bus full of characters whose temperaments you aren’t certain of and the physical toll all of this takes.
There’s even a touch of non-denominational religion. As the bus-driving character notes, “I’m not sure I believe in God, but other folks do — Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, the god of methamphetamine, the angel of mercy, the devil of petty resentments. We’ve all got something to serve. Everyone’s got their measures, their needs, their fears, their places to be. So they all ride. We’re all coming along on this one.”
Off Route is a gritty and fast-reading novel whose characters are people many in the Eugene-Springfield area would, perhaps, ignore on any given day, and that is a shame. These characters — the working class, the poor, the homeless, the addicted — help form the rich mosaic of our community, and Levin does a wonderful job of bringing out their humanity.
As for buses themselves, I have been a passenger on many LTD rides. I have seen how difficult the job is, eyes on the road and on all the passengers. Every time I depart, I am sure to catch the driver’s eyes looking at me in the rear view mirror and wave.
It’s a sign of respect. Respect for the person, respect for the service and the working-class reality — respect we should always carry. And it’s the respect that Rick Levin gives in spades with Off Route.
