The Best American Travel Writing 2007
Susan Orlean, Houghton Mifflin, 2007

The Best American Travel Writing 2007

Susan Orlean, Houghton Mifflin, 2007

There’s one thing a traveler never wants to be: a tourist – you know, that kind of visitor to another country who is only there to see the sights, who isn’t ashamed to carry a guidebook, who only experiences what previous visitors have experienced, who doesn’t acquire an authentic, unique impression of the place. “That’s not me,” every self-respecting traveler wants to think. American travel writers are almost universally focused on making the distinction between tourism and travel, and The Best American Travel Writing collections are, each year, intent on making clear that they’re not about tourism. This latest collection, however, is especially keen on avoiding the tourist trap; the foreword by series editor Jason Wilson makes fun of guidebooks and volume editor Susan Orlean has chosen selections that, in many cases, stretch the definition of travel writing and in no way could be considered tourist journalism. 

Orlean, one of the best among contemporary American travel writers, picked more than one piece that is concerned more with depicting a journey than in creating a sense of place, with travel writing being more than destination writing. A piece from Backpacker Magazine, “Lost in America,” profiles an obese man who resolves to walk all the way across America in order to lose weight and ease his troubled mind. The story spends its time in a psychological examination of the man and never dwells too much on his physical journey. This is spiritual travel writing. 

There is a good dose of traditional travel writing here, though. There is even, heaven help us, a story, from GQ, Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Long Day’s Journey into Dinner” about a woman who takes a romantic wander through Provence, sampling French gastronomic delights with her new lover. It’s hard to imagine anything more cliched or touristy than a story about a woman reveling in romance and food in the French or Italian countryside, but I suppose we shouldn’t expect anything more from GQ. We might, however, expect more from Orlean. 

One thing that is fascinating about my annual review of this collection is that it allows me to track the trends in American interests when it comes to exotic foreign destinations. In the years following 9/11 it was difficult to get writers out of the Middle East, but that fixation seems to have passed, or at least Orlean is not held captive to it. The single selection in this volume set in the Middle East, Reesa Grushka’s “Arieh,” which takes place in Jerusalem, is refreshingly not about the political conflict there. 

The collection contains excellent pieces. Peter Hessler has emerged as the foremost American writer about China, and his “Hutong Karma” is a fine piece of travel writing. So are Ian Parker’s “Birth of a Nation?,” about a tiny island community that may or may not be a country, and the late David Halberstam’s “The Boys of Saigon,” a poignant piece about not only a geographical space but a chronological one as well. 

There are, of course, some not-so-excellent pieces. Rick Bass’ “Lost in Space” is a nauseatingly metaphor-filled look at the American West, and Jonathan Stern’s “The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment” is too clever for its own good – and not nearly funny enough. Ian Frazier’s humorous contribution, “A Kielbasa Too Far,” a rumination on travel illnesses spurred by the memory of a bad sausage eaten in St. Petersburg, is much funnier. 

The spirit of the book, however, is captured in the very first selection, Jason Anthony’s “A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth.” Anthony, a technician stationed at an American scientific base in Antarctica, gets the chance to make a very quick trip to an even more remote place, a Russian base much deeper into the continent. Anthony’s piece about spending 20 minutes at the Russian base is an exercise in self-flagellation; instead of interviewing the residents, sitting down with them and sharing their exotic cuisine, becoming for a few minutes one of them, he simply looked around and took a few pictures. He was a tourist rather than a traveler, and for that he seems unable to forgive himself. 

Never mind that Anthony went someplace that none of us will ever go, that he is uniquely positioned to describe to us a place that we can barely imagine – no, his shame is that for those 20 minutes, he was just a guy with a camera. He failed to enter the club of non-tourist travelers, those who think that leaving the guidebook in the hotel room somehow gives them a more authentic experience of a place.