Driving Home

Starred review from July 11, 2011
With his characteristic curiosity and his insatiable desire to drink as deeply as he can from the wells of landscape or literature, Raban (Passage to Juneau) once again vividly captures the experience of trying to make a home in a place that he continues to find fascinating, bizarre, ugly, beautiful, repellent, and generous. Raban moved to Seattle from London in 1990, imagining that the life of writing could easily be transported in an age of instant communication, and because he met someone. In this diverse collection of dispatches from life in a new land, Raban ranges widely over the territory into which he has alighted, exploring the turbulence of waves as he sails the Pacific coast, the vagaries of American politics, the destructive ravages of natural disasters such as the Mississippi floods of 1992, and the difficulty of going home again. Drawing on two then new books on the mid-20th-century photographer Dorothea Lange, for example, Raban adroitly observes that "across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition... the warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they appear." In one of the collection's most charming pieces, "Why Travel?" he ruminates about the ways to turn travel into adventure: "The good traveler is an inveterate snoop... worming your way into the skin of a true denizen, you begin to see the landscape itself as a real place and not just as a the pretty backdrop to your own holiday." Like a stalwart travel guide, Raban points out the charming as well as the peculiar details of America's cultural, political, and physical landscape.

July 1, 2011

The acclaimed writer offers a collection of essays about America and Americana.

Arranged chronologically (1993–2010), these pieces chart Raban's (Surveillance, 2007, etc.) move in 1990 from London to Seattle and show his various explorations of the geography, politics and sociology of his newly adopted land. In the introduction, he writes about his love of reading, crediting his mother for teaching the skill and instilling the desire and critic William Empson for showing him how to read deeply. (Empson reappears in Raban's penultimate piece.) Throughout, Raban reveals the traits that have long endeared him to his readers—a curiosity about the quirkiness of people and places, a ferocious love for the land, an elegance (but never pretentiousness) of style, self-deprecation and an unusual ability to inhabit the imaginations of his interlocutors. In the forests around Seattle, for example, he displays his understanding of both loggers and tree-huggers, land-lovers and -developers. He understands resentments. In the title essay, readers may be amused to note that he records a visit to Forks, Wash., now world-famous as the setting for the Twilight novels. Throughout his American odyssey, Raban writes about Mark Twain, Puget Sound, the Mississippi River floods, the dams on the Columbia River, waves along the Oregon coast, the sailor Joshua Slocum, sailing, the evolving architecture of Seattle, Seahawks' fans in Montana, the vicissitudes of Robert Lowell and prominent Republicans (George W. Bush, Sarah Palin) and the Tea Party, for whom he has slight regard. Occasionally, he leaps back to his native England to write of Philip Larkin and George IV. As in any such collection, some repetitiveness emerges, but never enough to annoy.

Full of ideas that move through the language with the grace of a well-captained sailboat.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
Literary success mandates collecting an author's best. This volume picks from Raban's past two decades of production. Born in Britain but living in Seattle since 1990, Raban writes in a variety of genres, all of which are represented here: introductions to sailing classics, travel reportage, literary criticism, the personal essay, and political commentary. In all but the last, he stands detached from cant and superficiality, which is perhaps prerequisite for the striking originalities and aperus with which he leavens every article. Unfortunately, his political preoccupations jarringly clash with the exploratory aesthetics of this anthology, which would have been better had he saved his politics for the sequel to My Holy War (2005), his prior political assemblage. Otherwise, this book functions excellently as a smorgasbord. Sampling some of everything, readers may gladly follow Raban for layers beneath the surfaces of his subjects, becoming immersed in such matters as the history of landscapes (especially those of Washington and Montana), the perils and pleasures of sailing, and assessments of authors (Raban's book reviews are outstanding exercises in the genre). At its best, a delight for literary-minded readers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Provocative, multi-award-winning author Jonathan Raban offers a collection of essays that will receive national media and review attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)