Father and Son
by Jonathan Raban.
Knopf, 323 pp., $28.00
One morning in June 2011 the British writer Jonathan Raban woke with a bewildering sense of frailty and lost balance. As he climbed the stairs to the third floor of his house in Seattle, the city he’d made his home since 1990, his left shoulder “kept on bumping against the wall”; at supper that evening the knife in his right hand slid uselessly across his meal, “flatly refus[ing] to carry out the order transmitted to it from my brain.” Just shy of his sixtyninth birthday he’d suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing his right side. It was a condition from which he never fully recovered.
Raban, who died in January 2023 at the age of eighty, was perhaps the most subtle and percipient writer on travel of his generation. He hated the term “travel writer,” which seemed to him to constrict and trivialize the profession, and once referred to travel writing—with approval—as “a notoriously raffish open house where very different genres are likely to end up in the same bed.” He himself was a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, and a critic, but throughout the 1980s, together with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, he was credited with reviving travel writing as a literary genre. There were notable practitioners in the generation before him (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris, Norman Lewis, and Ryszard Kapuściński spring to mind), but Raban’s brilliantly digressive, sometimes confessional style—with its descriptive exactitude and sardonic undertow—signaled new possibilities.
I first met him when he was a lodger with Robert Lowell in London in the early 1970s. Lowell had responded warmly to Raban’s radio review of (they then went fishing together), and they remained friends through Lowell’s return to the States in 1977, the last year of his life. For Raban the US held a special allure. Compared with a seemingly stagnant England, he relished America’s vigor, its emotive landscapes and shifting migrations. In (1981) he sailed down the Mississippi in a sixteen-foot aluminum skiff; (1990) was a footloose reimagining of immigrant experience, from New York to Alabama, the Florida Keys to Seattle; (1996) explored eastern Montana and (1999) recorded a thousand-mile sea voyage along the Inside Passage to Alaska, a journey interrupted by his father’s death and ending with his third wife leaving him.
