Into the Blue Again

Writing America

Into the Blue Again: Writing America

What’s wrong with these two sentences?

I am writing a novel set in America.

I have never been to America.

Pretty much everything, you might say. And you wouldn’t just be reiterating the tired Creative Writing injunction to write what you know. North America, as more than one commentator has observed, is more like a world than a country. The sheer scale of its landscape, its teeming cities, its multitudinous diversity, its kaleidoscopic culture, is daunting. The USA is heterogenous in the extreme. Certainly, it’s more challenging for a British writer to set a contemporary novel there than, say, Croydon. And particularly now, with the political turmoil of Trump’s second term, and the socio-economic divides that are becoming gaping chasms. The USA is more of a moving target than ever. It’s not somewhere you would choose to stage a novel, with its delicate balance of external conflict and intense interiority. Not unless you knew the territory back to front.

And yet a number of famous novels and plays have been set in locations the author had never visited. For centuries, writers have been fooling us into believing they knew a place inside out while never leaving their desk. Did Shakespeare ever travel to Italy, for instance, to gain the background for Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice? It’s doubtful. He made too many geographical errors for a start, famously separating Milan and Verona by water in Two Gentleman of Verona. Defoe might have never travelled further than Lisbon, but he convinced us Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on a desert island. Saul Bellow set Henderson the Rain King in a fictionalised version of Africa, though he’d never visited the continent. His worst novel, you might say (and I would agree), but that’s perhaps not the point. He didn’t do the in-the-field research (relying, instead, on National Geographic magazine), but somehow got away with it, at least as far as his indulgent critics of the 1950s were concerned.

Maybe there are places we just feel we’ve been to already, so relentless has our exposure to them been. I’ve been absorbing - or hungrily imbibing might be a better description - American culture for as long I can remember. The first cartoons I loved as a child (apart from the French-originated Magic Roundabout and the deeply English Bagpuss) were American. Zonked out on the living-room scatter cushions after school with my brother, catatonic before our new Rediffusion colour TV, we would devour The Wacky Races, Hong Kong Phooey and Scooby Doo. Later, we would gulp down the gritty New York streets of Starsky and Hutch with their iconic steam-blowing manholes and grimy yellow cabs. Similarly, the lush LA pools and mansions of Charlie’s Angels, or the dusty Californian valleys of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Later still, the swampy Deep South of The Dukes of Hazard and the Boston barflies of Cheers.

When we were old enough to go to the Stevenage ABC and see films unchaperoned, another America opened up for us, though the certificates of most of these prohibited entry. In 1978, two of the biggest movies (and ones we were too young to see) were Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. De Niro’s inscrutable, bearded face was never off the cover of our issues of Film Review and Photoplay, with dramatic pictures inside of him in his vigorous prime, aiming his hunting rifle; or Christopher Walken with a pistol to his sweating head surrounded by jeering Vietnamese dicers. Why the film was called The Deer Hunter, we were never sure as we doubted there were many deer in Saigon. It was clear these films were necessary for America to salve the collective trauma and guilt of the war. The following year, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was similarly everywhere. By this time, my brother and I were obsessed with American movies and were collecting anything connected with them, knocking on the door of the ABC’s box office and begging for posters once a film’s run was over. One of these was Apocalypse Now, and we coveted the haunting image of the choppers on the dawn raid, superimposed over Brando’s Easter Island face, all refracted through a fug of Agent Orange

Of course, Saturday Night Fever was another forbidden film, though the closest we got to it was the soundtrack album and the poster mag, which unfolded to reveal a tableau of Travolta in his creamy flares preening on the flashing chequerboard dancefloor under the eternal mirrorball. The one American film we were allowed to see was Grease, with Travolta reprising his role as the archetypal priapic young man. Grease, I’m ashamed to say, was a blast from start to finish. There was something about the sheer glossiness of the technicolour, its unstoppable esprit and bravado, that shook me up. The ‘Greased Lightning’ dance workout in the auto-spares workshop was as glamorous and high-energy as any of the Gene Kelly musicals our mother liked to watch on rainy afternoons. I came out of the movie thinking: so this was adolescence, then. This is what comes next. After the peaceful idyll of childhood we were all destined to go girl or boy-crazy, losing our minds while dancing around in black spandex pants and leather jackets. I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to it. Moreover, it was an American adolescence that was on show, with diners, open-top Cadillacs and prom queens. I wasn’t convinced this was what a Hertfordshire smalltown adolescence would deliver, and I would be proved correct.

The 1990s witnessed a second Renaissance of American movies that seemed to pick up the adventurous, irreverent spirit the 70s. The less said of the intervening years the better. By 1980, the whole edifice of high-water mark Americana – of beautifully made films such as Five Easy Pieces, Badlands, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Manhattan – would crumble to be replaced with the likes of Ghostbusters and the A-Team; tawdry trash that anticipated a new, racially intolerant, religiously righteous America whose legacy is still visible today in Trump and MAGA and a myriad contemporary ills. But the 90s saw startling films from emerging directors such as Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers and David Fincher. All very male, and it was a very male America on show, with only the action movies of Kathryn Bigelow, and Sofia Coppola’s debut The Virgin Suicides, making a real impact when it came to female directors. Scorsese, long a chronicler of America’s underbelly hit another winning streak with Casino and Cape Fear, period films which both felt fresh and edgy at the time. Yet another fresh cinematic take on the USA was provided by movies directed by non-American directors, such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, both of which depict a panoramic America, obsessed with its own iconography and scale; its potential for limitless freedom, or its flipside, getting lost.

Despite this lifelong immersion in a culture that seems tantalisingly familiar, researching a novel on a country I’ve never visited has proved hard going. As with the versions of America discovered by Wenders and Scott, the non-fiction I’ve found most fruitful are two books written by outsiders. Both are essentially road-trip narratives. The first, chronologically speaking, is Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, written in 1947 and beautifully translated by Carol Cosman, and recently reissued by Penguin. De Beauvoir’s account of her encounter with a post-war United States is scintillatingly vivid. Beginning in New York, she’s simultaneously drawn to, and repelled by, America’s vulgar superabundance, its vigour; its lack of Old Europe’s restraint, refinement and manners. Douglas Brinkley, in his introduction, observes that De Beauvoir has ‘uncanny eyes for the shallow extravagance of American culture and an abolitionist’s rage at the evil of segregation south of the Mason-Dixon line’.

The second book is a contemporary account of a woman’s odyssey across the States. Joanna Pocock, in Greyhound (published by Fitzcarraldo in August 2025) embarks on her journey almost two decades after her first, which followed a miscarriage. Beginning in her native Canada, Pocock brings a novelist’s skill to on-the-road encounters. Naming De Beauvoir’s book as one of ‘only three accounts of women undertaking the Great American Road Trip’, she observes that in male versions of the same sea-to-shining-sea journey, ‘there are fewer conversations with strangers, the individual is paramount, and the car is a symbol of intoxicating, virile freedom’. The worst offender here, she suggests, is Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, written in 1960; a travelogue which follows the world-famous novelist across the USA with his French poodle, Charley.

A valid criticism perhaps. Yet, when I finally read Steinbeck’s book, I was surprised to find the venerated, booze-addled middle-aged author undertook the trip precisely because he felt like an outsider in his own country. In a letter to Frank Loesser, he professes that he seeks ‘re-knowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes, and its changes’. What he discovers is that America’s desire for ‘more material toys’ has resulted in boredom: ‘The nation has become a discontented land’.

My only conclusion is that, if America’s great chronicler - the writer of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, no less - can find himself a stranger in a strange land, maybe a novel written by someone who’s never been there can provide an insight into the mythical Land of the Free. It will certainly be more exciting than writing about Croydon.