It’s noticeable, however, that many such local stories tend to have a historical edge. Kevin Brockmeier’s account of a war conducted through bumper-plates, between people declaring ‘Speak Up For Decency’ and those preferring ‘Speak Up For Liberty’, is admittedly very amusing (‘There was a brief hiccup of Tolerance, I am told, but I was away from home and I missed it.’). But I’m not convinced it represents a peculiarly Arkansas narrative. Occasionally something specific does emerge, as in an interesting piece by Joshua Clark about the ‘ghost tours’ of New Orleans — they tried marketing them as ‘history tours’, but nobody came. And sometimes you feel that there is a regional reality which the writer has missed — fans of HBO’s sublime series, The Wire, may be a little let down that the account of Maryland stays so firmly in where-north-meets-south territory.

On the other hand, some of the pieces which don’t join in with the regional tendency are the most successful, such as a hilarious piece by Said Sayrafiezadeh about a gormless trip to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. And any suggestion of ‘authenticity’ in the narrow sense is made complicated by a good range of pieces about the essential American experience, that of the immigrant, among which Jhumpa Lahiri’s lovely piece about her family in Rhode Island stands out.

Oddly enough, the one place in the whole country which, after reading this volume, I experienced a passionate desire to go to immediately was Utah, just to see the giant Mormon boulevards of Salt Lake City. David Rakoff makes it sound just like Pyongyang with better supermarkets and stranger underwear. Tara Bray Smith, on the other hand, succeeded in persuading me that whatever else happens in my life, I will never, ever go to Hawaii.

There are some exceptionally distinguished writers here — among them Dave Eggers, Jayne Anne Phillips, Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen and the wonderful Joshua Ferris, elbowing Carl Hiaasen’s reputation out of the way with a brilliant piece on Florida. The book is adorned, too, with some charming statistics, telling you that Tennessee has seven separate State Songs, West Virginia has a ‘toothlessness rate’ of 40.5 per cent, Kentucky has 2.4 roller-coasters per million head of population, and the difference between the highest and lowest oil consumption per capita is a factor of some 385 per cent, between Alaska and Connecticut. All very fascinating. I might even go there one of these days.

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