American Smoke, by Iain Sinclair – review

If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language. You will also know that he has opinions to express and projects to promote or destroy: London’s Olympic park was one of his targets. He has lived in Hackney for much of the past 40 years and his previous book of that name was so provocative that Hackney council tried to ban him from giving a reading at a local library. He can be digressive to an extent that becomes challenging, as you would expect from a writer who long ago rejected the need for anything as banal as a narrative. And of the 41 earlier works of ‘documentary’, fiction and poetry listed on the flyleaf of this volume, many have been set in the UK, specifically London.

But American Smoke, as the title suggests, is mostly set in the US and is as close as I can imagine Sinclair coming to a road book, even though the road is far from straight. Following him from the 1960s to the present day, from the village of Ripe, Sussex, where Malcolm Lowry lived and died, to various points in America, and back to Shoreditch and Hackney, to Germany, to the Texan library where Kerouac’s and Sinclair’s own archives now reside, is like trying to trace the pattern of a spider’s web.

The theme which has replaced a clear narrative is his obsession with writers of the Beat Generation — Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, but also the lesser known Mark Van Doren and the modernist Charles Olsen. With some of these writers Sinclair feels a creative kinship, and with others — Burroughs, for instance — he has shared moments.