The Best American Travel Writing 2005
Edited by Jamaica Kincaid, Houghton Mifflin, 2005

The last time I reviewed an edition of The Best American Travel Writing, I had two major criticisms. First, I didn’t like the fact that the majority of the selections were drawn from a small handful of publications. And I thought there was too much journalism and not enough traditional travel writing in the volume to make a truly representative sample of the best American travel narratives. The last time around, I suggested that the problem might be with the volume editor and not with the series itself; I hoped that future volume editors would be a bit more catholic in their tastes and, correspondingly, better able to produce a reliable survey of top-quality American travel writing. I may have been right in my diagnosis of the problem, but unfortunately, the latest volume of The Best American Travel Writing suffers from some of the same shortcomings of that previous edition - and I’m beginning to lose faith that the series has the will to change its ways.

The volume editor this time around is novelist Jamaica Kincaid, and, as always, she was supplied by series editor Jason Wilson with “hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications.” And, as seems to be the norm, Kincaid condensed that huge, diverse pile of travel writing down to a tight collection of pieces drawn primarily from just a few different publications, most of them the most well-known, heavily bankrolled magazines in America. It really shouldn’t be surprising, I guess, that an editor would produce such a tunnel-visioned volume; editors have consistent personal tastes, and magazines have consistent editorial styles, so it makes sense that an anthology editor would prefer pieces that were published in particular magazines that share her editorial sensibilities, even if that means shutting out the vast majority of the travel writing published in America in a given year.

Kincaid’s favorite publications include the perennial contenders: 14 of the volume’s 25 pieces come from Harper’s, The New Yorker, Outside and National Geographic Adventure. Kincaid didn’t chose anything from The Washington Post Magazine, one of 2003 editor Ian Frazier’s favorites, but she did include three pieces from The Missouri Review, meaning that more than two-thirds of the volume comes from five publications. That makes it even less diverse than the 2003 edition that I complained about before.

The problem with all this - elitism aside - is that it makes for a collection that is anything but eclectic. Magazines tend to have predictable editorial preferences, and when you include several pieces from each, the whole volume begins to drift into an uninterrupted monotone. Outside, for example, likes to publish semi-adventure pieces in which macho journalists venture into dangerous hotspots, while The Missouri Review apparently prefers moody, angst-filled pieces by deep-as-can-be writers on the expat circuit. So we get Ben Ryder Howe dodging guerillas in Panama and Murad Kalam nearly getting killed by Muslim zealots in Saudi Arabia. And we get Timothy Bascom as a child of missionaries in Ethiopia, Tom Ireland facing mid-life in Thailand and Charles Martin Kearney having relationship troubles in Asia. The other big name magazines like exotic-flavored issue journalism, and there’s lots of it here: pollution and poaching in Africa, disappearing languages in South America, disappearing fish in the Great Lakes, the violence of the hajj in Saudi Arabia. Fine pieces, all of these, but after reading them, one can’t help but long for something with a wildly different flavor.

The good news is that, in the chinks between these big pieces, are quite a few little gems. Ian Frazier’s hometown travelogue about the congested and depressing Route 3 in New Jersey is innovative without being cute. Pam Houston’s “The Vertigo Girls Do the East Tonto Trail” is straight-ahead outdoorsy narrative about, believe it or not, hiking in the Grand Canyon. Peter Hessler’s “Kindergarten” again shows how adept the writer is at maintaining the difficult balance between cultural immersion and objectivity; his writing about China is, without doubt, among the best travel writing of recent years. Seth Stevenson’s “Trying Really Hard to Like India” is fun, although despite the editor’s insistence that it’s iconoclastic, the essay adheres to the long and glorious tradition of the traveling curmudgeon.

True, two of these four pieces were originally published in The New Yorker, so maybe Kincaid knows what she’s doing after all. Still, one can’t help but wonder what was in those hundreds of diverse publications that Wilson sent to her, the ones that we don’t get to see. One could argue, maybe, that everything worth reading is published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, CondÈ Nast Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Gourmet, and the New York Times Magazine, but I don’t buy it. I’ve read too many good travel pieces in newspaper travel sections, specialty magazines, web sites, and regional magazines to believe that all the best stuff comes from the publishing world’s inner circle. It would be nice if I could count on an anthology like The Best American Travel Writing to gather all that harder-to-find, worthy writing for me, but I guess I’m going to have to keep looking for myself.

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