Phew! Rap, joints and Coke

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA Gavin Young Hutchinson £

Besides being notably un-original, this book's title is also misleading; Gavin Young has not crossed America, but merely hopped about in it instead, from New England to Georgia to Texas to the Yukon. His subjects are Melville, Sherman's march to Savannah, Chandler, Steinbeck, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and Jack London - an eclectic if not especially imaginative roster, that need not necessarily have produced a bad book, but which in this case are the innocent sources for an absolute stinker.

Sloppy, pedestrian, repetitive, self-regarding, sometimes offhand, this is truly tired stuff. It is not news that American beer is gassy, that the coffee is often thin, or that some of its citizens are overweight. Nor is there any charm or interest in a travel writer grousing about tourists; "ageing" and "elephantine", they form a queue for the cafeteria on a ferry up the Pacific coast of Canada (as you do, if it's lunchtime) and Young snipes, in the tone of a petulant prep school boy, "Talk of greedy guts."

Altogether worse, however, are Young's saloon bar asides about America's urban problems. The violence, he casually remarks, is "often drug-induced". He doesn't take to Atlanta because the centre is almost empty, "except for the shambling presence of some possibly homeless, and evidently workless, blacks who may or may not have been on drugs." Talking to a black journalist, he makes "quite a speech" about black Americans having nothing to do with Africa; I imagine the journalist sat there thinking Young was quite a twerp.

In LA, he does have the decency to imagine the circumstances in which a hard-pressed South-Central soul might develop "a barely containable urge to burn something down" - but by the time he's off enjoying Yellowstone, he's forgotten that. Considering why more black people don't go there, he wonders, "Could it be that they preferred to remain entombed in their inner city ghettoes?" This is patronising, insensitive - really, words fail me.

They fail Young a fair bit too. Among the parade of lazy clichs and brochure phrases - trees are "cloaked sentinels", clouds are like "wisps of an old man's beard", Cody was "certainly worth a visit" - the Yukon so defeats him that all he can finally muster for a conclusion is "Phew!" I'm glad he had a nice holiday, but it takes a bit more than trudging round a few battlefields and quoting from Gone With The Wind to get to the heart of the Civil War.

At one stage he merely serves up chunks from his diary. For the most part, it's true, these are not noticeably less developed than the rest of the book - although the remark that "the rock faces are hard, dark rock" did catch my eye. What did he think they might be: cheese? Other whopping redundancies include the fact that when it's 40 below, you have to wear a lot of clothes. Phew.

For insight, for illumination, for the voices of the people, look elsewhere. This is a man so calcified and incurious that he can actually ask, "Rap dancing, joints and Diet Coke . . . is that all that youth is interested in today?" Young meets the president of what he "imagined was some sort of `Green' save the ecology organisation". But does he bother to find out precisely what sort? He does not.

One soon learns not to expect him to bother; this is a book so disconnected from present American realities that at one point he proposes Queequeg and Tashtego from Moby Dick as models for the dispossessed youth of America's "minorities". I can see them reaching for the harpoons even now.

Standing by the water from which Muriel Kingsley's corpse floated up before Marlowe's eyes in Lady In The Lake, Young tells us he feels "suddenly old and sad". All too much of this book feels the same; the publishers who think they can charge £20 for it should be ashamed of themselves.