Jonathan Raban's work crosses, or rather ignores, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, history and memoir, reportage and criticism. Though he has frequently written about voyages, he is in no traditional sense a travel writer. His journeys are historical, personal, and metaphorical, guided by no map save Raban's lifelong sense of dislocation and the abiding home he finds in books.

Raban's first major work, Soft City, explored the metropolis as a foreign place, a wide-open landscape of self-invention. Later books—Arabia, Old Glory, and Hunting Mr. Heartbreak among them—took him abroad. Coasting and the novel Foreign Land brought him back home to an equally foreign England. Resident in Seattle since 1990, Raban has more recently turned his attention to his own new, far corner of America: Bad Land documented the travails of failed settlers in turn-of-the-last-century eastern Montana; Passage to Juneau traced parallel voyages to Alaska, his own and George Vancouver's; and the novel Waxwings captured the twilight of the Internet boom just before the darkness of post-9/11 America. His most recent work, My Holy War, is a personal meditation on this darkness. A second novel set in Seattle, Surveillance, is due in September. I corresponded with him via email from my own West Coast perch during the month of April, 2006. -Owen Wozniak

Loggernaut Reading Series: I first learned of you in, of all places, the opening pages of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity. Harvey launches his dizzying analysis of late twentieth-century capitalism's destabilizing effects on our experience of time and space with a discussion of your book Soft City. Harvey isn't too kind to your book. He sees your ruminations on the perils and possibilities of self-invention in the modern metropolis as a symptom of the foreshortening and downright denial of time and space implicit in postmodern discourse. When I finally read Soft City, I came away with the distinct impression that Harvey had missed the point. The London of Soft City is not a theoretical abstraction but an intensely observed place, experienced by someone struggling to survive in it—a place in which the ghosts of Dickens's novels exist uneasily alongside the bohemians, professionals, and other modern pilgrims with whom you ambivalently identify. Looking back on Soft City, do you find any credence in Harvey's implication that your depiction of the city is too intensely personal or too subjective to meaningfully capture its "reality"? Or put another way, how does the theorist in you communicate with the memoirist?

Jonathan Raban: Yes, years ago someone sent me a photocopy of those pages from the Harvey book. I found them a bit opaque, and am glad to hear that the overall impression made by The Condition of P-M is—as you say—"dizzying."

What I hoped Harvey was going to say (alas, he didn't) was that Soft City was itself a postmodern object, with its mix of fiction (one chapter was first published in Encounter magazine as a short story), memoir, literary criticism, and sociology. In its time, it was thought an odd book: I remember reviewers calling it "annoying" and "maddening" because they wanted it to be something else (a social study, an autobiographical novel, a history of modern London) but it refused to fit into whatever genre they thought it ought to belong to. My own take on it was pretty simple: I was trying to get at the city from a lot of angles at once, and using what experience I had as a former lecturer in English Literature, an avid reader (then) of sociology, especially that of the Chicago school, an occasional writer of fiction, and a recent arrival in London.

In 1968–1969, my last year at the University of East Anglia, I taught an interesting—at least to me—course on The City (1870–1910), alongside a social historian, Geoffrey Searle. We had readings in literature, history, politics, with the occasional dash of sociology, and students could count the course as a credit in either history or literature, whichever best suited them. The two teachers had a lot of fun back-and-forthing—my literary take on Geoff's historical documents, his historical take on my novels and poems. "Interdisciplinary" was a good word in those days, and I had that course at the back of my head when I sat down to write Soft City a couple of years later. I wasn't self-consciously trying to construct a hybrid form for the book, I was just reflecting the way I thought, in a sloppy interdisciplinary way—being an academic one day, a book critic the next, drawing from my own experience the next, and so on. I was surprised, and rather hurt, when some reviewers found the book eccentric and show-offy.

So I like your question about "how does the theorist communicate with the memoirist." Amiably, I'd say—though I'm hardly a theorist, more a sometime academic who can't kick the habit. It's surely natural to use other people's ideas to shed light on one's own personal experience, and one's reading life is just as much a part of "life" as sex or traveling. At one level, Soft City is a book about someone wandering down the Earls Court Road in 1970, wondering what Dickens, or Georg Simmel, or Claude Levi-Strauss might have to say about the terrain—and of course it's the reflection of an instinctively bookish sensibility. There are writers who like to keep their own reading hidden from their readers as if it were a secret vice, but I'm not one of them.

LRS: Having let loose the word "postmodernism," I'm eager to know where you stand on it. It hadn't occurred to me to consider Soft City a postmodern text, since to my mind books that are postmodern distance themselves in some way from that which they seek, aiming for ambiguity, parody, or formal confusion, but never directness. Yet what Soft City has in common with much of your later work is its quality of directness, its searching engagement with the places and lives around you. Do you see it, or any of your later work, as postmodern in any sense? Does that word have any certain meaning to you?

Raban: Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. Perhaps the last of the great modernists was my friend (though he was born one year before my father) Robert Lowell, whose work is rather scandalously out of fashion now. (You may have noticed that Soft City is dedicated to him and to his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, another close friend.)

Lowell wrote in a way that seems impossible to my generation—as if poets from Horace and Juvenal through Andrew Marvell and Baudelaire were his contemporaries and first cousins... as if he'd known them all

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