Tim Lott's novel of cultural collision explores what happened when two estranged British brothers, Salinger and Carson, travel across America to find the dying father who abandoned them both many years ago. While Salinger stayed in the UK, making his living as an illustrator, Carson also crossed the Atlantic where he would become a born-again Christian with a penchant for gas-guzzling automobiles and ill-fitting denim. It's clear that more than an ocean separates these two.
Reluctantly reunited they go on a journey which takes them from post-Katrina New Orleans out into Texas. Lott has some fun with the conventions of the Great American Road Trip, interspersing moments of emotional revelation – Salinger has an intense Native American healing experience and Carson comes to question his faith – with scenes set in diners and motels, the brothers being served vast slabs of meat and buckets of cola by a succession of interchangeable elephantine waitresses.
The novel has an intriguing relationship with the American experience, seemingly both fascinated and a little repelled by it. Affection for the literature and cinema of the US runs through the writing, with Steinbeck's East of Eden and the films of James Dean the most overt points of reference. Lott tinkers with expectation but cannot help himself affectionately embracing as many truisms as he upends, the brothers encountering their fair share of smart-mouthed cops and sassy convenience store clerks as they head out west in their Lexus, not to mention numerous people who find Salinger's English ways at best bemusing. Both the novel and the characters seem very aware of where their narrative fits in the American tradition. It's not exactly an ironic stance, it's subtler than that.
As with many such narratives the journey is just as, if not more, important than the destination, and the ending is inevitably slightly anticlimactic. But as entertaining as it is as a travelogue, the American aspect of the novel eventually comes to feel secondary to the tender story of two brothers gradually relearning each other after years of living on opposite sides of the world.
