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[Raban continues]... basic narrative spine on which to build the flesh of other kinds of writing. And if you go back to the history of the novel—that other low form, as it used to be thought of—that's true of novels too. Vide Moll Flanders or Tom Jones—tours of English society, high and low, threaded on to the string of one character's life.

Solitary travel makes one hungry for company and conversation. You find your society where you can—seated on the next barstool, or walking on the dock. Strangers on a train often talk more easily to one another than they can to their immediate colleagues and friends—it's like being in a confessional, talking to the priest behind the screen (not that I have much experience of confessionals, but still.) I relish such talk, and give at least as much as I take. I'm not being an "observer," I'm a wholly engaged participant. But then, back home writing, I betray those confidences....

I've very rarely felt that I was "gathering material" or "doing research" on my various trips: I was just trying to get along as best I could in the company in which I found myself, while hoping that later, much later, the experience would turn out to be something I'd be able to write about. The writer is never entirely off duty, but in my experience he takes a back seat to the person who is talking of the woes of marriage or whatever. Later, when he's in the driver's seat, assuming control of the story, he'll undergo a change of personality, become a tyrant as he subordinates one detail to another or turns his erstwhile friend into a figure of speech.

But I guess I ought to confess that I'm tired of travel memoirs: I feel I took the form as far as I could in Passage to Juneau, and don't feel much temptation to return to it. That's partly political. Since September 2001, the world on the front doorstep has become so urgently absorbing that it seems like defection to travel away from it. Maybe under another presidential administration I might feel differently, but for now I'm chained to this place, stranger and scarier at this moment than anywhere I've ever visited. Here is what I want to write about, not there, at present.

LRS: Misanthropy was a poor choice of words. So was introspection, for that matter. What I meant to suggest was an awareness of distance, and a respect for the possibilities inherent in that distance. I would also like to ask about this turn in your orientation away from travel writing. You've written Waxwings, a novel that captures a suddenly distant age, and My Holy War, a unique take on the post-9/11 cultural and political climate in a corner of America uncertain of its relationship to the world at large. Can you say a little more about how (or if) the advent of this ostensibly new era and your vantage on it has affected your interest in and approach to fiction?

Raban: I feel bereft of any theory on this. I get miserable when I'm not writing, so I write whatever I can.

On 9/10/01 I was about one third of the way through Waxwings. From 9/11/01 to sometime in February '02, I put the manuscript aside, thinking that I might never look at it again. The only thing I was able to write during that time was the title essay of My Holy War, a sort of autobiographical approach to the jihadis. Then I picked up Waxwings, and saw a way of continuing it as a post-9/11 novel, with the attacks implicitly foreshadowed but never directly mentioned. Then I dickered around for a long while with essays and commentary pieces—driven to write them by simple incredulity at what the Bush administration was doing, or threatening to do, in Iraq and here at home in the "war on terror."

Your question suggests a change of hats, but I'm not conscious of changing hats when I write—of being a "fiction writer," or a "travel writer," or an "essayist," "book reviewer," "radio playwright," or whatever. Each piece of writing has its own technical requirements of course: settling down to a 2000-word piece is different from the long-haul rhythm of a 100,000-word book. But the formal difference between, say, Bad Land and Waxwings is far slighter to my eye than it probably is to yours, and I'm more struck by their similarities—their multiple points of view, their anchoring of characters in a landscape, their back-and-forthing between past and present, their use of 1500–2500-word differently-angled building blocks to make a patchwork mosaic within each chapter. That one is a novel and one is "nonfiction" seems to me a rather tiresome librarians' distinction, and I wish they could be shelved side by side, where they belong. Just as there's a lot of documentary fact in Waxwings, which is set very specifically in Seattle between November 1999 and March 2000, so there's much fiction in Bad Land—every time I plant myself in the shoes of a homesteader and look out through his or her eyes, I'm writing fiction not strict reportage. Or there's a short essay at the end of My Holy War which grew out of my forthcoming novel, Surveillance, where the thoughts belong to a distinctly not-me fictional character. So I slop about between genres whose existence I barely recognize.

It just happens that in the last six or seven years, which roughly correspond with the advent of the Bush administration, the ideas that have presented themselves as candidates for books all required to be written as novels. Maybe this simply reflects a desire to stay home. The book I'm working on now is rooted in a first-person, seemingly true-life narrative, like Passage to Juneau, but the story it tells is imagined, so perforce it's a "novel." But I hardly notice that when I'm writing, and a casual reader, opening a page at random, might well mistake it for "nonfiction."

All of which is a tiresomely long-winded way of saying, no, I don't think there's any special connection between my present political preoccupations and my recent run of writing novels. It just turned out

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