Stranger on a Train

Jenny Diski endeavours to circumnavigate the United States ...by train. She's not really intent on doing anything more than watch the scenery whip past and smoke. She finds a special place in the smoking car with it's cracked linoleum floor, institutional gray walls and hard plastic chairs. There, along with the outcast, nicotine hungry pariahs she can unrepentantly smoke in peace.

People seem to have other ideas and their lives and attendant stories reach out to her. Diski does a fair bit of literary people watching, enjoying that strange bit of alchemy that renders strangers immediately familiar when you're travelling. Otherwise unremarkable fellow travellers are rendered with warmth and each come with their own unique stories to tell.

While it did win the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award there's precious little consideration given to the passing American landscape. This is more a snapshot of the distinctly American lives that join Diski on her journey.

I am struggling a bit with this review, as this book was very different from my expectation. Sometimes that is a good thing... but not this time.

I usually find winners of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award excellent. This book won in 2003. For me however this is not a travel book. In this book travel is the least important element. America is just a setting, only what is seen out the train window when the author breaks eye contact with her fellow passengers, or sits alone in reflection. This book is much more a memoir, and a series of retold aspects of other peoples stories. Often the memoir and the passengers tale link, sometimes they are more random. The train, other than the description of the conditions of the smoking carriage, simply forms a part of the backdrop.

For me, it doesn't help that the theme of the whole book is a glorification of smoking. Almost exclusively, the authors interaction on the train is in the smokers carriage. The author loves smoking - always has, and always will. She describes is with more passion than any other element of this book. It does nothing for me, and the continual describing of it eventually stirs disgust in me. Normally, I can ignore it - you know - up to her, doing that damage to herself in her own time, no issue to me. But it is just so central to this book...

So for travel, 1 out of 5; as a memoir (and don't get me wrong, some of it is quite interesting), 3 out of 5; and for the telling of other peoples stories, 2 out of 5. Just not loving it the way many of the other reviewers seem to. Overall, that lands it at 2 stars.