The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Sarah Vowell is an American writer who explores what it is to be American.

She has an uncanny knack of writing confidently about the Big Issues absorbing the US establishment (the Bush/Gore election débacle, the terrible events of 11 September 2001, gun law), but she can also be very entertaining on a more light-hearted level (the moral certainties of The Godfather film, the former hedonistic glories of the now down-at-heel Chelsea Hotel in New York, why Tom Cruise makes her nervous).

She is not unaware of the absurdities of American society and is deeply sceptical of her fellow-citizens’ knee-jerk patriotism and her government’s more questionable policies, but she is honest enough to admit that she loves her country regardless.

She goes to Washington, DC for George Bush’s inauguration, but she is there to protest – and cry – about the injustice of his victory; she rubbishes a recent trend for aggrieved citizens to equate the plight of Rosa Parks on the Alabama bus in 1955 with their own problems; she visits several Presidential Libraries to see whether they tell the unvarnished truth about their subjects.

Vowell’s secret is that she never gets bogged down in her numerous and varied subjects. She is particularly adept at including personal anecdotes that somehow always appear to be relevant. In one 14-page chapter, she manages to write about President Theodore Roosevelt, the low self-esteem of North Dakotans, her sister Amy and her nephew Owen, bagels, an encounter her father once had with a rattlesnake, bison and Broadway Danny Rose.

Of course, she could be accused of shallow thinking and gratuitous over-use of cultural references to beef up her writing, but there is more to her than this. Sarah Vowell is the embodiment of white, middle-class, liberal angst, but she’s witty and touching (and occasionally annoying) with it, cautiously optimistic in spite of everything.

Also by Sarah Vowell

Take the Cannoli
Assassination Vacation