Leaving England for... Seattle?

For the essayist the past is less a foreign country than a home address, a lodestar or touchstone, in Phillip Lopate's words the “Aladdin’s lamp which he or she never tires of rubbing.” It is more markedly so in a collection assembled over time, or in the case of Jonathan Raban, over the two decades this eloquent Englishman has spent in America. Raban presents his selections humbly, mindful of the gap that separates American from British English. “The longer I stay here,” he writes, “the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf.” It is impossible not to take to the author of a book called “Driving Home” who reveals that on his arrival he made the greatest of idiomatic American mistakes: he bought the wrong car. Less than gently, the woman for whom he had crossed the ocean translates. What message does his black Dodge Daytona communicate? “Midlife crisis,” she answers. “Who drives them?” he asks. “Kids. Black teenagers. Gang members,” she replies, crisply. She sounds very much aware that she is interpreting for a man who previously assumed Oregon to be an invention of Bernard Malamud.