It makes perfect sense that Nancy Crocker, author of the highly memorable novel "Seeing America," began her career as a singer. Her assured and resonant authorial voice rises like that of an accomplished soloist above a chorus of others writing in the coming-of-age-via-road-trip tradition.

Crocker takes earnest and thoughtful narrator John Hartmann on a literal and emotional journey of discovery in the company of blind Paul Bricken and neighborhood tough guy, the bigoted Henry Brotherton. As the novel opens, the three young Missouri men are restless with their small-town situations and hungry for adventure. When Paul buys a Ford Model T and invites John and Henry to join him on a drive to Yellowstone Park, the two youths clamber aboard.

The year is 1910. Halley's comet makes its magnificent way across the sky, inspiring awe and agitation. It's a time of great social upheaval, as the headlines and the people across America are full of tense anticipation of the first interracial prizefight, between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. Paul's preoccupation with the upcoming fight and his daily request for having headlines read aloud to him keep the narrative firmly anchored in its period. Paul's sightlessness also gives the author the opportunity to describe to Paul and the reader — in the voices of John and Henry — the landscape and everything from road hazards to threatening thugs in local saloons.

And as the travelers make their way, their mettle is tested by flat tires, hunger and thirst, a mugging and robbery, a car crash, and an ugly racial incident.

They also find goodness, personified by Amos and Orville Heverson, a pair of brothers who "looked a little like potbellied stoves wearing overalls." The sense of security that they offer does not end when their visitors leave, as Orville makes an X on the map and says, "We're right there, son. Right there. Ten days or ten years, the door's open as long as we're alive."

It's this kind of steadiness of narrative voice, married to visual detail and deftly crafted characterization, that makes this book sing. "We'd build a fire … and it was like a hearth with the whole prairie our parlor and the ceiling shot through with stars," John muses at one point. At another juncture, he describes a comment made in a "voice flat as railroad tracks."

Overall, Crocker's work brings to mind Walt Whitman's words, "I hear America singing." Long after the book is closed, "Seeing America" seems destined to stay in the mind like a tune that arrives in your head unbidden and yet welcome.

Rosemary Herbert is a longtime literary critic and the author of "Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery."