Hi Alaska, I appreciate speaking directly TO you, people I’ve never met, and about whom I confess I’m more than a little mystified. Some say things changed for you on August 29th last year ??? the day John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to be his running-mate ??? I say things changed for me three days earlier, when I left the country that sort of contains you and moved for a year to England.
See, I can’t get my head around the fact that I’ve missed the whole story. From sudden rise to national prominence, through the postmodern syntax of the TV interviews, right up to the self-pitying resignation speech. Say it ain’t so, Joe! Sure, I watched it on the BBC, but it had a cartoonish quality on British television (which was, perhaps, true to life in this case) that had me, well, gosh, just scratchin’ my head. Really? Really? If I have learned one thing, Alaska: LIFE is about narrative twists! Our great country, with its God-given bounty of television sitcoms and reality show confessional booths, has grown used to plots that resolve themselves within 22 minutes. After all, life is too short to compromise time and resources… and as General Motors said, it ain’t only dead fish who get that glassy-eyed look when they’re, um, dead.
You know what I mean, Alaska?
But still, I’m a bit stunned by the speed with which our national narratives resolve lately. When I left the country, Bernie Madoff was just a little-known Wall Street financier with a name Dickens would have thought too obvious. When I read in the British papers about the sheriffs showing up over the weekend to evict Ruth from her fancy Upper East Side apartment, I thought, What is this? America: the Comic Book? It’s all happening too fast! It’s not how we’re wired. It’s not what is best for Alaska!
Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me ??? cricket“ The last time I spent a year in England, I knew it was time to go home when I found myself watching cricket on television on a rainy July afternoon. And, even worse, I kind of understood it. (For example, the scoring: based on my observations, I’ve deduced that each team earns points based on the amount of white sun cream the bowler can apply to his nose.) I’ve now spent a total of three years in England, which is about the same length of time it takes for the average cricket match to unfold, and there are plenty of things ??? like the plumbing ??? that I’ll never understand. But one of the interesting things about living abroad is that your narrative expectations change as your body clock adjusts to local time. Stories and jokes are told at a slightly different pace, the poetry has a slightly more discursive tone, like an Oxford Wit making “casual” remarks to a crowd of people at a party, and the novels have, well, less gunfire.
Someone asked me the other day if I’d ever consider writing a novel set in England. The question made me wonder: can an American write convincingly about England? It’s been done, of course, not least by Henry James, who knew the unspoken conventions of British culture as fully as any American could, but usually through the narrative of the American abroad, which allows the author to sidestep this problem of cultural difference. Could one write about England without that convention? I’m an American by birth, and frankly I’m not sure I understand American culture (particularly what passes for America in the mind of someone like Governor Palin). In a sense, one can see it more clearly from a distance, as any number of expat writers have argued, but only if your underlying cultural knowledge allows you to fill in the gaps the same way your eyes make a cowboy from a little light and leather when you go to the movies.
I’ll be returning to the US at the end of this month. I don’t want to disappoint anyone with my decision, and I know that many of the citizens of Alaska will take it hard. But the Home Office and Kenyon College have both been quite firm: I can’t stay. So I am taking my ironic liberal media detachment from the lives of ordinary Americans in a new direction. Back to Ohio, as it happens. I’ll miss standing outside American life the way that a reader stands outside the events of a novel. But I also can’t help feeling I should hurry home before the plot of the Great American Comic Book changes again.