Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home:
It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be widely promoted … as the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world. People like to think of themselves as undergoing not mere relocation but full- blown resurrection here in the smoke- and cholesterol-free city of Seattle, where eternal life is thought to be a viable alternative to two packs a day.
In Driving Home, you can follow Raban’s progress: in 1990, he was an immigrant living with his new American wife in a rented apartment with furniture bought at garage sales. Two decades later and Raban has more than simply settled in. He is a much sought after writer and commentator on the American political scene. There are pieces on George Bush and the war on terror, and how that campaign was pursued on the American domestic front. There are pieces on Bill Clinton and Obama. There are several on sailing, one of Raban’s major and constant preoccupations. Raban had owned a boat when he lived in Britain, which he moored on the Blackwater estuary in Essex. He bought another boat in Seattle, a 35-foot ketch.
Raban wrote in 1998:
The move took me from shallow to deep water; from sandbars and swatchways, where the echo-sounder dickers around the 10-foot mark, even in the middle of a buoyed channel, to the abyssal inland sea that stretches from Puget Sound to Glacier Bay in south-east Alaska. Here, the echo-chamber searches in vain for an answering rebound from the dark sea-floor, where the giant bedroom-eyed Octopus dolfeine reclines on its soft bed of silt.
What ought to be said is that Raban hardly left Britain a failure. Unlike some of the people he writes about, Seattle — home of the original Skid Row — was not his last chance saloon. By the end of the 1980s Raban was an accomplished literary journalist and author. He had taught English at the University of East Anglia. He had edited a selection of Robert Lowell’s poetry and had written several travel books — about Arabia, the Mississippi and sailing round Britain. Soft City, his book on urban experience, was and remains one of the best books on city life. In For Love and Money, an earlier collection of his writing, Raban wrote about how he moved to London and set himself up as a literary journalist living in Notting Hill when Notting Hill was interesting, unlike the mono-dimensional gated community for the wealthy that it has become today. Which is to say that when Raban arrived in Seattle it wasn’t as if he had a reputation to make. He’d made a name for himself in London, which he has enhanced in the US, as this book shows.
I moved to the US a few years after Raban and I read many of the pieces in Driving Home when they first appeared. I hadn’t realised how closely I’d followed Raban over the years until I read this new book. There’s the 1993 review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin, which was published by the New Republic — a book said by Raban to be ‘brilliant’, though I remember thinking at the time that Raban’s assessment of the life and poetry of Larkin was more astute than Motion’s book. Raban’s account of the 1993 Mississippi floods that was commissioned by Granta was extracted by the Independent on Sunday. I bought that issue of the newspaper at Hotlings on West 42nd Street, the long-gone newsagent near Times Square that sold out-of-town and international newspapers. At Hotlings, you could buy not only the Independent on Sunday and the rest of the British press but also every local newspaper in the US — and every local newspaper in Ireland.
Hotlings has vanished: the newsagent lost its raison d’être with the emergence of the web. Some of Raban’s pieces from the early 1990s may remind you of the time when ‘out of town’ meant something that it no longer does. Driving Home is a big book but it reads as if it’s a short, anecdotal history of the United States from 1990 to 2000, and if you have never read a book by Raban this is a good place to begin.
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