The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflection and revelation. Stranger on a Train is a combination of travelogue and memoir, a penetrating portrait of America and Americans that is at the same time an unsparing look in the mirror. Traveling and remembering both involve confronting strangers—those we have just met and those we once were—and acknowledging the play of proximity and separation. Diski has written a moving, courageous, and deeply rewarding book about who we are, and the landscapes through which we have passed to get there.
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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.
