Las Vegas

In italics at the very end of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion spills the beans: ‘Writers are always selling somebody out.’ It’s hard to improve on that, but we can at least specify that she had journalists in mind, not poets or novelists, though probably she looked on all scribblers with a cold eye. Six years later, Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne published Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which isn’t really a memoir, more a queasily auto-biographical novel. Or, as he puts it, ‘a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined’. A time and also a place – Las Vegas, Nevada, in the early 1970s.

There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice.  In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or pared back, with nowhere to wash, rest or buy food.

Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is recounting a road trip that she and her husband Lewis took through the American Southwest in 2018 – while a deadly fire was sweeping through northern California. The trip was bookended by disasters you could describe as closer to home: before it, Lewis’s mother died; after it, Lewis disappeared. By combing through their time in and out of the ‘climate-controlled interior of the car’, Eloise tries to figure out what happened. The journey is part business, part pleasure. Eloise is researching her dissertation on the Colorado River.

So you’d like to borrow half-a-billion dollars? It’s a tribute to the epic ambitions of this novel that the reader swallows questions like this without blinking. In a sense that’s fair enough because City in Ruins is the third book of a trilogy loosely modelled on the great poems of the classical world, particularly the Iliad and the Aeneid. Don Winslow is probably best known in this country as the author of the widely praised Cartel trilogy, about the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s ‘War of Drugs’. The Danny Ryan trilogy, by contrast, deals with the life and times of a Rhode Island longshoreman who evolves first into a gangster-with-a-heart and finally into a more or less legitimate businessman with a tendency to backslide. He’s a decent man who sometimes does bad things.