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Summary
Summary
For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, Driving Home charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by "a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers" ( Newsday ).
Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a Tea Party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle. He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers, and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, he has an outsider's eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.
Frank, witty, and provocative, Driving Home is part essay collection, part diary--and irresistibly insightful about America's character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.
Author Notes
Jonathan Raban was an award-winning travel writer, novelist, and critic. He was born in, Norfolk, England on June 14, 1942. He studied English at the University of Hull. He went on to lecture at Aberystwyth University. Then he taught in the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia.
His early writing was done while on vacation. He wrote fiction and journalism. In 1969, he moved to London and became a freelance writer and journalist, writing book reviews and literary criticism. He felt inspired by his friend, Robert Lowell. Who turned some of his own life experiences into art.
Raban's travel books included Arabia: Through the Looking Glass (1979); Old Glory (1981); Coasting (1986); Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1991); Bad Land: An American Romance (1996); Passage to Juneau (1999); and Driving Home: An American Journey (2011). He wrote three novels, Foreign Land (1985), Waxwings (2003), and Surveillance (2006).
He won many awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and others.
Jonathan Raban died on January 17, 2023, in Seattle, Washington, of complications from a stroke, which he had in 2011. He was 80.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
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 apercus 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.--Taylor, Gilber. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR the essayist the past is less a foreign country than a home address, a lodestar or touchstone, in Phillip Lopate's words the "Aladdin's lamp which he or she never tires of rubbing." It is more markedly so in a collection assembled over time, or in the case of Jonathan Raban, over the two decades this eloquent Englishman has spent in America. Raban presents his selections humbly, mindful of the gap that separates American from British English. "The longer I stay here," he writes, "the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf." It is impossible not to take to the author of a book called "Driving Home" who reveals that on his arrival he made the greatest of idiomatic American mistakes: he bought the wrong car. Less than gently, the woman for whom he had crossed the ocean translates. What message does his black Dodge Daytona communicate? "Midlife crisis," she answers. "Who drives them?" he asks. "Kids. Black teenagers. Gang members," she replies, crisply. She sounds very much aware that she is interpreting for a man who previously assumed Oregon to be an invention of Bernard Malamud. Raban offers the work of his expatriate years up wholesale, billing his essays as readings "of the American landscape, literature and politics, along with some backward glances to England that may betray a lurking nostalgia for a society more settled in its shape, more instinctively known, than the one I live in now." The displacement, the attention to a familiar, foreign language, the lurking sense of another world account in large part for his success. The comprehensiveness is more problematic. Raban takes as his hero William Empson, the influential critic whose work Raban discovered over his first college summer and whom he would befriend a decade later. It was Empson who encouraged him to dive below the surface of the page. It was Empson who taught him to slow down, "to listen, savor, question, ponder, think," of which Raban does a great deal here as he conjures with his new home, with the Pacific Northwest, with history, poetry, geography, catastrophe. He continues his love affair with water, as ever Raban's natural element. Among the aquatic essays come his travel writings, his reviews, his personal and political pieces, assembled in rough chronological order. Essay collections are the stuff of day trips rather than extended holidays, but this one makes for an uneven journey all the same. It will reward the reader who dips in and out. Raban is always fluent, regularly epigrammatic, sometimes revelatory. In acknowledging the Pacific Northwest's appeal to "hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast," he notes that Seattle is about resurrection as much as relocation. The salvation of wildlife blurs easily into the salvation of self in that corner of the country, where recycling operates on many levels. Driving the wrong car does nothing to blunt Raban's powers of perception; in America, he observes, "where the lust for the antique is no less keen than in Britain, the true antiquity is wilderness." In one of his finest essays, Raban dissects President Obama's Inaugural Address. Leave it to an Englishman to read every speech since George Washington's. (Well, leave it to an Englishman to admit he skimmed all 56.) Raban locates a subversive point in Obama's address, artfully buried in platitude. He reminds us, too, that Obama thanked his predecessor for his service to his country in five words. He thanked him for leaving in 10. Either because he learned his Empson lessons well, by reason of temperament, or because he has never stopped holding the receiver close to his foreign-born ear, Raban knows how to listen. Several times I found myself wondering - not only on account of his velvety prose - if he sings. Again in a political essay, he parses Obama's campaign speeches to find the clear cadences of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Presciently, Raban noted in 2008 that crowds turned out for the sermons, but the eyes glazed over when the candidate-evangelist delivered policy talks instead. From "this scrupulous agnostic" the public hungered for "the ecstatic consolation of old-time religion.") Raban has an ear. Who else has noticed that Obama is a "melancholy baritone," George W. Bush a "scratchy tenor" and Sarah Palin - don't even try to pretend you knew this already - a mezzo-soprano? Raban is no slouch himself when it comes to coloratura. His voice is supple and sumptuous, seductive even when his point is highly debatable. Lewis and Clark may be "America's foremost male couple," but I'm not sure they qualify as the most endearing figures in our history. Raban knows that the best essayist trusts in drift and digression and habitually adds a literary trill. He is an erudite but adaptable companion, tart and genial, promiscuous in experience yet reliable in temperament. He is on the page as he professes to be on the water, without a flag, "preferring to think of the boat as an independent republic; liberal-democratic in temper, easygoing in its manners, bookish in its daily conversation." Generally, he displays a sailor's sense of decorum. We get to know his love of good late-night talk (Seattle goes to bed hopelessly early for his taste); his weakness for Waugh; his affection for the authentic, the seedy, the regional. On the other hand, we get to know some of these things too well. Raban moves from London to Seattle more times in these pages than I could count. No one has ever eked so much copy out of his adopted city's devotion to REI, Eddie Bauer and Velcro; its deracinated feel; the calamitous migration, to the suburbs, of great dim sum. "Driving Home" bogs down in those repetitions but is especially waterlogged by its comprehensiveness. A little judicious pruning would have worked wonders. The opening essay, Raban's meander around the West, feels stale, as indeed it should; it not only predates GPS but was published in 1993. A desultory 18-year-old article explaining America to a foreign readership is perhaps not the best place to open a collection in any event. After Katrina it is difficult to appreciate Raban's account, however closely observed, of the Mississippi climbing out of its banks in 1993. And a five-year anniversary piece about 9/11, written for a British audience, is surely one for the file drawer. Motley is fair in a collection. Moth-eaten is not. There is the past, in all its rosy glory, and there is the recent past, wan and immature. Too many of these essays occupy a soggy middle ground, not so much half-ripe as beyond their expiration date. Raban's political reporting and literary criticism provide the ballast here. Agile the first time around, his essays for The New York Review of Books are only better an second reading. Both with a text and in the literary portraiture department he is matchless. His description of Philip Larkin, from The New Republic, is unlikely ever to be bettered. Visitors to Larkin's Yorkshire home "were met by a well-scripted character whose tone was pitched midway between the reactionary acerbities of W.C. Fields and the self-deprecating complaints of Eeyore the donkey. Pale and flabby, carrying his 230 pounds like a shifting liquid cargo, Larkin was kitted out with two hearing aids and thick specs that served as windows to a house whose interior was hidden in gloom." Raban slips Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World" brilliantly into context, taking both its author's pulse and that of his age, making the case that this 1900 memoir amounts to Mark Twain's "Walden." These subjects Raban circumnavigates with finesse, shrugging off the obvious and - as is evidently his habit alone at sea - regularly landing us on a shore we can't quite glimpse from here. Stacy Schiff is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author, most recently, of "Cleopatra: A Life."
Kirkus Review
The acclaimed writer offers a collection of essays about America and Americana.Arranged chronologically (19932010), 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 readersa 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 theTwilightnovels. 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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Driving Home In the spring of 1990 I packed up as much of my life in London as would fit into a suitcase and four large plywood boxes and flew to Seattle to set up house. It was a selfish and irregular move. I had "met someone" and liked what I'd seen of the Pacific Northwest during a two-month stay there the previous autumn. I liked the aquarium lighting, the sawtooth alps forested with black firs, the compact cities encrusted in dirty Romanesque stucco. Most of all, I liked the place's wateriness. At forty-seven I felt cracked and dry. My new home territory was as rainy as Ireland, puddled with lakes and veined with big rivers. Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains. We took a house on the wrong side of Queen Anne, the innermost of Seattle's hilltop suburbs. The tall wooden house, built like a boat from massive scantlings of Douglas fir, carvel-planked with cedar, had been put up in 1906, in the wake of the Yukon gold rush, when the hill itself was logged. It had warped and settled through a string of minor earthquakes: the floors sloped, doors hung askew in their frames, and on a silent night it groaned and whiffled like a sleeping dog. Barely a mile from the new banking and insurance skyscrapers of downtown, the house felt as if it were hidden away in the woods. Shaggy conifers, survivors of the original forest, darkened the views from every window. The study looked down over the Ship Canal, where trawlers stalked through an avenue of poplars on their start to the Alaskan fi shing grounds, eight hundred miles to the north. From the top-floor deck one could see out over the pale suburbs, like shell-middens, to the serrated line of the Cascade Mountains, still snow-capped in May. For someone fresh off the plane from London, it was a vast prospect in which making oneself at home would not be easy. It had been fine to be a tourist in this landscape, when I had been enjoyably awed by its far-western heights and distances; but now that I'd signed up as a permanent resident, the view from the window seemed only to reflect my own displacement. Even the very near-at-hand was strange. I kept Peterson's Western Birds and the Audubon Guide to Western Forests by the typewriter. I made lists and pinned them to the wall. Cedar, cypress, dogwood, laurel, madrona maple, I wrote, trying to distinguish individual personalities in the jumble of damp and muddy greens framed by the window. I took the tree book down to the garden and, wary of attracting derisive looks from the neighbors, matched the real-life barks against their close-up color pictures; the peeling, fish-scale skin of the lodgepole pine, the frayed hemp rope of the western red cedar. It took a month, at least, to be able to see the black-crested Steller's jay in the madrona with something like the comfortable indifference with which I'd used to notice a song thrush in the sycamore in Battersea. It took a good deal longer to adjust to how adeptly the rufous hummingbird, like a tiny thrashing autogyro, redisposed itself in space, zapping from point to point too fast for the eye to follow. Glancing up from the typewriter, stuck for a phrase, I'd catch sight of a bald eagle slowly circling on a thermal over the Ship Canal, its huge wings still and ragged, and lose the logic of the sentence to another half hour of involuntary ornithology. The German word for "uncanny," as in Freud's famous essay on the Uncanny, is unheimlich --unhomely. The tourist thrives on the uncanny, moving happily through a phenomenal world of effects without causes. This world, in which he has no experience and no memory, is presented to him as a supernatural domain: the language of travel advertising hawks the uncanny as part of the deal. Experience the magic of Bali! The wonders of Hawaii! The enchantment of Bavaria! But for the newly arrived immigrant, this magic stuff is like a curse. He's faced at every turn with the unhomelikeness of things, in an uncanny realm where the familiar house sparrows have all fled, to be replaced by hummingbirds and eagles. The immigrant needs to grow a memory, and grow it fast. Somehow or other, he must learn to convert the uncanny into the homely, in order to find a stable footing in the new land. Hunkered down in the second-floor study of the comfortingly old and memorious house on Queen Anne, I tried to read my way home. My best guides were fellow aliens in the Pacific Northwest, from the early explorers of the region to such relatively recent arrivals here as the poet Theodore Roethke and the novelist Bernard Malamud. From the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth, they kept striking the same note of shock at the stupendous unhomelikeness of this landscape. ## It drove George Vancouver into a pit of what now appears to have been clinical depression. Between May and June of 1792, as he probed the inlets of Washington and British Columbia, he went from dizzy elation to sullen melancholy--and wrote his changing moods into the permanent nomenclature of the region. To begin with, he was high on his discoveries: this was "the most lovely country that can be imagined." He saw the Pacific Northwest as a kind of unusually verdant Devonshire, and imagined orderly villages with churches and manors laid out between the wooded hills. At this stage of the voyage, the names he gave to the headlands, bays, and fiords were upbeat: Discovery Bay, Protection Island, Restoration Point (the most beautiful and useful features, like Mount Rainier and Port Townsend, were named by Vancouver after his relations, friends, and patrons). May turned into June. As Vancouver sailed north, the mountains grew steeper, the inlets narrower, the woods more impenetrable. His lieutenant, Peter Puget, who kept a parallel journal, was increasingly excited by the romantic sublimity of what he saw: a few years younger than Vancouver, he was much more in tune with the rising generation's taste for wild nature. For Puget, the unfolding landscape was "majestic" and full of "grandeur"; for Vancouver it was increasingly "dreary," "unpleasant," "desolate," "gloomy," "dismal," and "awful"--the words pepper his descriptions, often being used twice in the same sentence. Five minutes north of the fi ftieth parallel, Vancouver brought his ship to a "dreary and unpleasant anchorage": "Our residence here was truly forlorn; an awful silence pervaded the gloomy forests, whilst animated nature seemed to have deserted the neighbouring country . . . " He called the place Desolation Sound. Thirteen years after the Vancouver expedition, in the autumn of 1805, Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River valley from the continental interior, after climbing to the headwaters of the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains in what is now Montana. William Clark, with his botched spellings and childish exclamation marks, was a resoundingly lively presence on the page. He was an original vernacular narrator as he confi ded his discomforts, Dear Diary--style, to his journal. "O! how horriable is the day--" he wrote when the tidal Columbia cut up rough in a westerly gale and waves drenched the explorers' camp. "We are all wet and disagreeable." Clark had grown up in Virginia and Kentucky, and, like almost every newcomer to the Northwest, was incredulous at the monotonous fall rains that soaked the country west of the Cascades. It rained day after day, hour after hour-- with the fine-sifted thoroughness and regularity of a gigantic lawn sprinkler. "This morning Cloudy and drisley." "Rained all the last night we are all wet." "Rain as usual." "Rained without intermition." "A blustering rainey day." "A hard rain all the last night we again get wet." "Rained verry hard." "Confined on a tempiest coast, wet." The swollen river carried with it the trunks of uprooted trees, "maney of them nearly 200 feet long"; as they spun around and around on the current, they often came close to capsizing the expedition's canoes. "Those monsterous trees--" wrote Clark, summoning the vocabulary of the uncanny to convey the gross abundance of this landscape. In 1947 Theodore Roethke came west to Seattle, drawn here by the offer of a job in the English department at the University of Washington. The city itself ("a kind of vast Scarsdale . . . no bars for anything except beer and light wines in the whole of Seattle") was tame and provincial, but the surrounding landscape roused Roethke, as it had roused Vancouver, to flights of concentrated pathetic fallacy. Before 1947, his poems had been full of emotional turmoil projected onto a vivid vegetable world of crocuses, geraniums, cyclamens, peaches, butternuts, pear trees, and spiders--a world enclosed by the same fences that bordered his father's market garden and nursery in Saginaw, Michigan. In the Pacific Northwest (" . . . the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists / Changing with every twist of wind . . . ") Roethke found a nature that was extravagant enough to give physical body to the extremes of his own morbidly dishevelled nature. His new poems mapped a wild, volcanic, thickly forested region of the heart and mind. In the geological melodrama of the Washington landscape, he found a spectacular objective correlative to the upheavals of his mental life--the uncontrollable ascents into mania, the whiskey, the compulsive womanizing. His last collection, The Far Field, posthumously published in 1964, is an inspired gazetteer of places that are simultaneously states of mind and visitable destinations within easy reach of Seattle. "Journey to the Interior," for instance, is both a fine description of driving on a logging trail in the Cascades (Roethke bought his first car, a Buick, in 1950, when he was forty-two and was thereafter an enthusiastic--and alarming--motorist) and a lightly encoded account of a life spent skirting the edge of insanity: In the long journey out of the self, There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places Where the shale slides dangerously And the back wheels hang almost over the edge . . . As the mountains represented the menacing heights, the rivers, lakes, and sea afforded renewal and balm. Roethke wrote beautifully about water, its movements and stillnesses. In the mental hospital, he spent long hours in hydrotherapy; sane, he found another kind of hydrotherapy, fishing for coho salmon from the Oyster River resort on the east coast of Vancouver Island, watching birds on Lake Washington, walking on the rocky margin of Puget Sound, watching small waves break. From "The Rose": I live with the rocks, their weeds, Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh Edges, their holes Cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash Of the long swell, The oily, tar-laden walls Of the toppling waves, Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds, And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands. Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas, Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself, As if another man appeared out of the depth of my being . . . It was exciting to watch Roethke making himself at home in western Washington by discovering that western Washington had always, as it were, been inside himself. To the view that I could see from my own window, Roethke attached names and meanings that went far deeper than Vancouver's. Of all the incomers to the Northwest, who had put this landscape to use and made cognitive sense of it, from fur traders and timber barons to aeronautical engineers and Dutch bulb-growers, Roethke was the most generous: if a stranger had as baggage nothing except Roethke's Collected Poems, he would have a solid imaginative foothold here. ## In 1949, Bernard Malamud left New York to take a job as an instructor in the English department at Oregon State College in Corvallis, lately an agricultural school. In 1961, he returned to the East Coast, where he had been appointed writer- in- residence at Bennington College in Vermont--and published his third novel, A New Life, a bitter comedy about a New York Jew, an English instructor, who finds himself stranded in a narrow-minded town in the wide-open country of the Pacific Northwest. Malamud's revenge on Oregon (as it was generally perceived by Oregonians) had for a long time been my favorite campus novel--though for years I believed that it was set in an invented landscape, a fabulous Far West that Malamud had cooked up in his Manhattan fastness. I had come across the book in 1964, in the paperback carousel at the new service station at Newport Pagnell on the M1 motorway. The cover was suggestive. Above the blurb, "He found strange refuge--love with another man's wife," was a drawing of a young woman reaching for the zip of her Levi's. The man in the background was small and wore a hat. I knew Malamud's name from the stylized short stories of New York Jewish life in Idiots First. I hadn't heard of this surprising novel. I read it in a sitting and have owned three separate copies since, but it wasn't until around the beginning of the second copy that I woke up to the fact that Malamud's "Cascadia" was Oregon, not an urban Jewish fantasy of some Eden far beyond the range of the road atlas. I hadn't then been to the United States, and the landscape described by Malamud--a green paradise infected by the encroaching spectre of Senator Joseph McCarthy--rang no specific bells for me. It read like the landscape of allegory, and worked so well in those terms that I wasn't tempted to go looking for its latitude and longitude. In the book, Marathon, Cascadia, is a rigidly conformist college cow-town, with a winning football team and a paranoid contempt for Reds, misfits, and intellectuals. Seymour Levin, "from the East," "formerly a drunkard," an admitted liberal with a beard, is destined for a painful roasting in this 1950s version of a Puritan township enjoying a witch trial. At every turn in the story, the philistinism and uncharitableness of town and college are set against a landscape of mountains, forest, and ocean so ironically magnificent that any reader bred to the landscape of Newport Pagnell must have doubted its literal existence. A New Life seemed to me to be written in the freehand, fantastic tradition of the Jewish folktale: Malamud was painting the richness and promise of the idea of America--and its betrayal by a mean-spirited citizenry, people too small to deserve to inherit their gigantic land. It slightly diminished the novel to learn that there were "originals" (or so my knowing American informant claimed) of the Fairchilds, the C. D. Fabrikants, the Buckets and Bullocks, and that Malamud's poisoned Arcadia was drawn directly from the life--that Marathon was Corvallis, sixty-five miles down the road from Portland. This American, a Berkeley professor, thought I was offbeam when I claimed the novel was a work of ambitious fabulism. No, he said, the landscape of the Pacific Northwest was in itself an unrealistic stretch of country--it was just naturally fabulous. The uncanny again. Twenty-five years on, I sat out on the deck of the house on Queen Anne on a sunny day in autumn when the visibility was good, rereading A New Life for the umpteenth time. To the right lay the Cascades, to the left the raised and snowy edge of the Olympics, and in the middle the mixed woodlands of the rolling suburbs of Seattle. A big ketch was sliding through the poplars. The sun made the print jump on the page, but now I very nearly had the opening of the novel by heart: . . . They were driving along an almost deserted highway, in a broad farm-filled valley between distant mountain ranges laden with forests, the vast sky piled high with towering masses of golden clouds. The trees softly clustered on the river side of the road were for the most part deciduous; those crawling over the green hills to the south and west were spear-tipped fir. My God, the West, Levin thought. He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time, and found it a moving thought. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him. He shuddered at his good fortune. "The mountains to the left are the Cascades," Pauline Gilley was saying. "On the right is the Coastal Range. They're relatively young mountains, whatever that means. The Pacific lies on the other side of them, about fifty miles." "The Pacific Ocean?" "Yes." "Marvelous." Just off to the side of the page margin, there was a flittering disturbance in the holly tree in a neighbor's yard. I shifted my attention from Cascadia to Washington, from the 1950s to the 1990s. A big flock of yellow-bellied waxwings had settled on the holly and were distributed on its branches like so many ornaments on a Christmas tree. High over the city, above the muffler shops and 7-Elevens and steep streets of pastel-colored frame houses, an eagle wheeled, sublimely. I was with Seymour Levin. My God, the West-- Independent on Sunday, July/August 1993 Excerpted from Driving Home: An American Journey by Jonathan Raban All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.