To America with Love

May 27, 2013
A fine comparison between American “swivel-eyed,” plainspoken audacity and Old World “inertia and precedent” veers into a witty, albeit gushing tribute in the hands of Scottish-born Vanity Fair contributing editor Gill (A.A. Gill Is Further Away). Mostly a resident of London but a frequent visitor to America, Gill has apparently evolved into a rather admiring apologist for many of the eccentricities of his home away from home. He devotes his stylistically jaunty essays to defending the country’s earnest belief in government by the people, as well as its brashness of character, frank celebration of success, sublime sense of nature, and childish delight in speechifying and hucksterism, among other things. While some Europeans pooh-pooh Americans for being ignorant and unintellectual, Gill celebrates the latter’s refreshing lack of cynicism, reminding his blasé, sour-grapes colleagues back in the Old World that many of their “brightest and most idealistic” ancestors chose to emigrate to the States (engendering the best universities in the world, as well as the most memorable speeches in English). Americans’ love of independence (e.g., cowboys on the open range), skyscrapers, philanthropy, and movies elicits some truly cheeky, tear-swiping observations by Gill, though he is most eloquent when describing his first encounter with the Appalachian folk of eastern Kentucky while visiting an American cousin in the mid-1970s as an art student at Slade. This is a wonderful work by a besotted, biting observer; we’re glad he’s on our side. Agents: Charlie Campbell and Ed Victor, Ed Victory Literary Agency.

Starred review from June 1, 2013
An ardent mash note to the vast, vital nation that confounds and beguiles its European cousins in equal measure. Gill (A.A. Gill Is Further Away, 2012, etc.) celebrates America's natural bounty, its lack of pretention and hidebound tradition, the dizzying diversity of its people and its startling capacity for invention in a series of witty, discursive considerations of the national character, as reflected by such American signifiers as guns, skyscrapers, movies and moonshine. The author provides engrossing accounts of historical events, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Scopes Monkey trial, distinguished by richly drawn portraits of the familiar figures involved and Gill's erudite but accessible prose style, which flits from arresting profundity to cheeky humor to wrenching pathos. The collection alternates memoir with examinations of American history and institutions; Gill's tales of his encounters with Appalachian moonshiners and Harlem barbers are warmly funny and rendered with the attention to detail of a fine short story. The author never condescends to his subjects or settles for juicy anecdotes; his brief is an appreciation of America as an expression of the sublime, a transcendent emotional response to the world that goes beyond the studied, safely curated idea of "beauty" as idealized by Old World European culture. Gill finds the sublime in American thought, writing and art, in its love of talk and argument, in its refusal to venerate the past above the promise of the future, in all of its lunatic variety and conflict and ambition. It's a passionate, richly literary love letter to a place and idea that remains unique in the history of the world. A stirring, funny, thought-provoking appreciation of the place, the idea, the experiment, the United States of America.

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June 1, 2013
The queue of Europeans fascinated by the U.S. and intent on explaining this new world grows longer: Cr'vecoeur and Tocqueville, Dickens and Wilde, Churchill and Alistair Cooke, academic Marxist Terry Eagleton (Across the Pond, 2013), and now Sunday Times of London restaurant and TV critic and Vanity Fair columnist Gill. If Eagleton was a fascinated if sometimes critical tourist, Gill is more participant observer: a Brit (born in Scotland) who traces, among other immigrants' journeys, the peculiar path one branch of his family traveled from Yorkshire to the wilds of cowboy Colorado, to the gritty brickyards and, decades later, shiny auto dealerships of mid-twentieth-century Detroit. Drawing examples from both the U.S. and Europe, Gill explores the social meanings of guns and rhetoric, skyscrapers and Playboy, invention and The Birth of a Nation, and Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy and Appalachian moonshine. Both Eagleton and Gill are feisty: Eagleton has attacked Richard Dawkins and both Martin and the late Kingsley Amis; Gill's crueler comments have produced more official complaints than any other Sunday Times writer. Readers should expect surprises as well as insights.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)