I am reading the collected travel writings of a well-known (living) American novelist and I'm struck by how lackluster they are. I've noticed this before when novelists write travel articles for magazines (which is where many of these pieces first appeared): They seem to see it as an opportunity to let up on the gas. Very much unlike the great British novelist/travel writers: D.H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. In the pieces I'm reading there are felicitous phrases of course, and, from time to time, insightful observations, but there is very little dialogue; there are very few characters other than the author and his companion; there is no attempt to engage with the place. Do novelists believe that, thanks to their well-honed intuitive powers, they don't have to; that they can divine everything essential just by observing from the sidelines? (True, Lawrence did this, but he had the genius for it.) Or is travel writing a vacation for them in every sense, allowing them to escape the narrative demands and imaginative labors of fiction and focus, finally, on themselves?
