When the hero of Jonathan Raban's new novel is scolded for living in a world of his 'own construction', the implied rebuke falls flat: this, for Raban, is the whole point of America. Raban's travel books present America as a 'glittering fiction', a country shaped by the ardent imaginings of its immigrant millions and by the universal reach of its popular fables - 'the mythology of the western and the romance of the frontier'. His America is full of towns with improbable, allegorical names (Promise City, Hopeville); fabricated places like the one-street towns of Bad Land (1996), 'doodled' into existence by the pens of railroad magnates. To inhabit such a country requires a fictional cast of mind, a willingness to make yourself up as you go along, to score out the old self and start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits.

LRB 6 November 2003 | PDF Download