A long detour along roads poorly described

From my earliest posts here, I’ve admitted to being a fan of travel writing, consummately working through shelves of essay collections in bookstores, searching out pieces that may offer a touch of whimsy or a more serious reflection, sometimes pointedly witty, sometimes ponderous and brooding.

But over the last few years, reading travel narratives has been a bit of a disappointment. So many books, magazines and publications contain journalistic, snappy texts that are functional and impersonal, with a minimal amount of asides, so that the pieces no longer meander [oh, say, along a buckwheat strip of yellow blossoms in a Slovakian village, where the only wealth is in the mouths of residents whose rotting teeth have been replaced by gold crowns, and where the most coveted piece of clothing is likely to be a tight fitting Frank Zappa t-shirt, worn on Sundays only, of course], but GET YOU THERE RIGHT AWAY, with bold purposefulness.

And I’m not thinking of travel guides (these have improved considerably over the years). I’m thinking of the classic travel essays, on topics as different as Parisian booksellers and the disappearing hutong neighborhoods of Beijing. For me, travel writing should not be hurried or terse. But neither should it distract with an overabundance of history or geography. These forays into factual accounting have cropped up especially in works of traditionalists of the genre–for example, writers for the NYT Sunday Travel Section—who are more likely to immerse you in historic asides these days than to offer a personal statement or an insight on a destination.

So, every quarter, I look forward to the NYT Sophisticated Traveler, and each time I toss it aside with great resignation.

But not today. Messud’s piece on Washington – a city where she once lived and now remembers with the kind of nostalgia that is reserved for places one has left behind—is sentimental but not sweetly so: “Perhaps perversely, I miss Washington’s almost puritanical streak, that it is no place to window-shop, no place for luxuries: all the fancy stores have long been pressed out to the suburbs, leaving the city center for industrious pursuits like the making of laws and money—but leaving room, potentially, too, for thought, rather than stuff.”

Mewshaw’s essay on pre-Olympic Athens hoists you, along with the author, into the cab which he takes from the airport: “the cabdriver smoked, as does apparently every man, woman and child in the country, and he fretted with worry beads as he tuned in bouzouki music on the radio.” The cab hits a gridlock. Mewshaw observes “It’s estimated that Athens has more than 2 million automobiles and 500,000 motorcycles, and at any given moment all of them appear to be stalled in anaconda coils of exhaust. For more than 20 years, motorists have, in theory, driven only on alternate days, according to whether they have odd- or even-numbered license plates. But rather than halve the volume of traffic, this law has prompted many people to buy two cars.”

And finally, there is the Livsey piece on wombats and kangaroos. It begins thus: “As a girl, growing up in Scotland, I knew exactly how to reach Australia. All I had to do was dig deep enough, and eventually I would emerge on the other side of the world, where everyone walked upside down and strange animals would hop to greet me. I was a determined child, but after several attempts yielded holes only a few feet in depth, I admitted defeat.”

Perfect essays. Travels writing took a detour, but now seems to be finding its animus and wit. That’s great news for the addicted reader. The future looks good again.