Christopher Ricks

When I was sitting down to write something about this book, that Razorlight song ‘America’ came fortuitously on the radio. I've always quite liked it – something about the way he sings ‘All my life / Been watching America…’ as the bass drops from A to D does indeed seem to sum up something essential about the experience of growing up in the UK, subjected to a steady (not unwelcome) drip of American culture. It's not a negative thing, not necessarily, it's just a fact…you absorb, through cultural osmosis, the habits, the speech patterns, the preoccupations and the psychic landscape of the United States.

I have a false nostalgia for aspects of my life that never existed: homecoming balls and proms, summer camps, parties after big football games, glances swapped with cheerleaders. I feel I know every square foot of an American high school, from the classrooms, through the locker-lined corridors, into the gymnasium or out on to the bleachers, so well that it's sometimes an effort to remind myself that I never went to one.

The first time I visited New York it felt like stepping on to a movie set – it was one of the most disorienting experiences I can remember. Other cities have landmarks, but New York City is the landmark; I walked around with an enormous grin on my face, recognising everything, and what makes it so bizarre is that it's not just the big stuff (‘Holy shit, this is where they brought down the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man at the end of Ghostbusters!’), it's everything. The way a woman crosses the street in Tribeca stirs a myriad memories of films and TV shows. Stopping for a bagel at night as the steam pours out of the subway grates: everything you do, every move you make is iconic, laden with preconceptions that have been poured into me since I was tiny.

At school in the late 80s and early 90s, America was like a golden land of magic treats. It was like the future: they would get the best toys and movies weeks before they were released in Europe. They had hundreds of TV channels while we were stuck with just four (well, five after 1997). They had a whole channel just for cartoons! They had a whole channel just for music videos! (Remember when MTV played music videos?) In America, you could get breakfast cereal with marshmallows in it. It's true, Jamie Lloyd's uncle went there on holiday and brought him some back. He brought them in to school to show everyone.

Later, as teenagers, it became fashionable to dislike the US. They're so fat! Why do they talk so loud? Well of course they don't understand sarcasm, over there. What is with the constant patriotism? They have psychologists for their pets. They insist on mispronouncing people's names: Coe-lin. Ahh-nna. Ber-naaard. I met an American once, she asked me if I knew the Queen. HAHAHA! British sketch shows did parodies of American talk shows, parodies which alarmingly would soon be surpassed in ludicrousness by actual American talk shows like Jerry Springer. It was not clear why, exactly, this mood suddenly manifested itself, but it had something to do with the fact that we had all been in awe of America before. When Britpop happened, supplanting the American grunge music that had previously been popular, this cultural inferiority complex found a new expression. I can remember listening to Blur's ‘Magic America’ and feeling that it exactly captured the sophisticated and ironic (as we thought – vapidly sarcastic, I would say now) way all my friends talked:

Bill Barrett has a simple dream
He calls it his Plan B
Where there are buildings in the sky and the air is sugar-free
And everyone is very friendly
Plan B arrived on a holiday
Took a cab to the shopping malls
Bought and ate till he could do neither anymore
Then found love on channel 44…

La la la la la, he wants to go to magic America
La la la la la, he'd like to live in magic America
With all the magic people….

This goes both ways, of course. It is baffling as a European to see the levels of sophistication and respect that are accorded to European products in the US. You only have to look at the way NYRB books are reviewed to see that the most turgid, unreadable nonsense will be greeted with serious nodding and acclamation if it's badly translated from Hungarian and introduced by Jonathan Franzen.

I didn't actually go to the US until quite late, I must have been in my late 20s, and when I did I fell in love with it completely. The space, the food, the lifestyle, the supermarkets, especially the people. American friends regularly complained about the service culture there, but I loved it – I don't care how insincere waiters are, I love being asked how I'm doing and treated with a façade of friendliness; it's infinitely preferable to the English system of ‘What do you want, here it is, fuck off’. (Don't even get me started on Paris.)

I loved it so much that after I got married we spent a month driving round Tennessee for our honeymoon, and then went back the following year and did Virginia. We've tried to go back as often as we can since (though I've still never been to the West Coast, or the hundreds of other places I'd love to see). My initial adulation has certainly faded, but I do think it's very hard not to be deeply inspired by American history, the way the country came into being, the ideals it attempted to embody, the vastness of the country and the extraordinary differences in lifestyle and attitudes found in different places. And hard, too, not to be moved by the situation it finds itself in today, stuck with one of the most egregious systems of inequality in the developed world, social welfare that is bad to nonexistent, and yet shackled with this divisive political system whereby any internal criticism immediately turns into a partisan slanging-match.

This collection, while it sadly doesn't find room for Razorlight or Blur lyrics, is a decent attempt to distil some of these concerns into representative writings from the last few hundred years. It suffers from many of the usual problems of an anthology – being somehow less than the sum of its parts – but it does distinguish itself by including both fiction and non-fiction, from Americans and non-Americans alike. Speeches, diaries, letters, short stories, it's a solid collection which should have plenty to help you work out your own feelings about the United States – envisaged here not so much as a country but as a phenomenon.… (more)