The Best American Travel Writing
Edited by Ian Frazier, Houghton Mifflin, 2003

The best travel writing is about both the traveler and the traveling, never just about one or the other. If a travel writer is too self-involved, the narrative tends to veer too far toward memoir, depriving the reader of a sense of visiting a new locale - the ostensible point of travel writing. On the other hand, if the writer is not present in his work, if we don’t come to know, in some sense, the person we’re traveling with, then the work is generally devoid of color, just journalism, merely travelogue. Either approach can yield satisfactory results, but neither could be considered to be the best travel writing. That’s where the title of The Best American Travel Writing 2003 misleads; too often the pieces included in the collection are focused on a sterile aspect of a place - its politics, its environmental challenges - and not focused enough on the experience of getting there and being there. Occasionally the pieces fall in the other direction, too; the authors are so infatuated with their own voices that the reader learns precious little about what’s going on around them. Either way, these examples aren’t definitively the best of any genre, and it’s arguable whether they are, in fact, travel writing at all.

The worst of the book, by far, are those pieces which fail to deliver, at all, on the advertised promise of travel writing. Lisa Anne Auerbach’s “Pope on a Rope Tow” is so tickled with its one-line premise - the Pope used to ski - that it tells us next to nothing about the article’s geographical setting, the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland. We are told only that Polish skiers do not wear bright colors and that smoked sheep’s cheese tastes like rubber. Geoff Dyer’s “The Despair of Art Deco” is, I suppose, intended to give us a glimpse behind the garish facade of Miami’s South Beach, but it’s mostly just cutesy rambling about two Brits (one of whom is named Dazed - and isn’t this supposed to be American writing?) stumbling around, “stoned on mad skunk.” “The Respect of the Men,” by Jack “Deep Thoughts” Handey is funny and everything, but its place in an anthology of travel writing is questionable since it’s not about, you know, travel. Ditto Hank Stuever’s expose of credit card payment processing in Delaware. The inclusion of Michael Specter’s “I Am Fashion,” a celeb profile of Sean Puff P. Diddy Daddy Combs, is even more of a mystery. It’s set in Paris, I guess, which is someplace that most of us would have to travel to get to, but isn’t every article set somewhere?

Not much better are the dry dispatches from foreign journalists in exotic lands, few of which do much to evoke the atmosphere of the places, aiming instead to showcase a controversial political issue or two. Tom Bissell’s “Eternal Winter” bombards the reader with statistics about the environmental disaster in Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea, while Scott Carrier’s “Over There” and Graham Brink’s “Stranger in the Dunes” play with the idea of an American in the recently forbidden lands of Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Morocco, respectively). These are fine pieces of journalism, but, again, they’re not, strictly, travel writing.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the limited scope of the collection. In his foreword, series editor Jason Wilson explains that he collected the best travel writing from “hundreds of diverse publications - from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to in-flight magazines.” However, it seems that volume editor Ian Frazier exhibited a preference for a much smaller segment of the spectrum passed on to him by Wilson. Of the 24 pieces included in the volume, five were originally published in Outside magazine, four in Harper’s Magazine, three in National Geographic Adventure and two each in The New Yorker and The Washington Post Magazine. That nearly two-thirds of the volume was excerpted from just five mainstream publications calls into question the real nationwide representation of the project, and it could also help to explain the general homogeneity of the book.

Indeed, there’s a droning sameness among the collection’s essays. There is an unmistakable and ultimately numbing echo of a post-September 11 fascination with/fear of the exotic, along with a revised contemporary definition of exoticism. Four of the pieces concern Islamic nations, with a heavy emphasis on the post-9/11 climate. More than twice as many slink into the old school American no-man’s-lands: Communist and formerly Communist countries (Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Cuba, twice) and Africa (with four trips to the Dark Continent). It’s true that these places have not been visited by the average American, but they’ve been visited to death by American journalists. Readers can be forgiven for longing to travel to less familiar destinations.

Not everything in the collection is bad. Rebecca Barry’s affectionate portrait of her train-loving father in “The Happiest Man in Cuba” is enjoyable, and Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for his lost Jewish ancestors in Ukraine (“What Happened to Uncle Shmiel?”) is terribly poignant. Emily Maloney’s “Power Trip,” about a ridiculous guided tour of a Japanese nuclear power plant, deftly walks the treacherous border between obnoxiously flippant satire, cultural commentary and personal essay.

Next year’s collection of The Best American Travel Writing will be entrusted to a different editor. Here’s hoping the individual chosen will look through all of the short-listed candidates as well as pay attention to the second and fourth words of the volume’s title, rather than just the third and fifth.

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