Coming Home to Jonathan Raban's Seattle

Reviews of Driving Home, Jonathan Raban's newest collection of essays, tend to mention, slightingly, that Raban relocates from his native England to Seattle so very many times over the course of these 493 pages. This is true. The seafaring Englishmanâ??a Stranger Genius Award winnerâ??returns nearly ad nauseam to the coming-to-Seattle narrative in essays published from the 1990s up to 2010 in various, usually American, magazines, turning the freshness of gimlet-eyed discovery into something akin to the glinting repetition of a Xerox machine flashing. We react to it on aesthetic terms. Yet there's meaning in this method of storytelling for the subject of "discovery." It points to the curious fact that discovery in the American West never seems to go anywhereâ??as if that were part of the setup, as if it were a narrative always bumping up against the incoming waves of the Pacific.