Why are we still writing the same escape story?
Bobuq Sayed's debut asks what happens when leaving America doesn't fix you
What if the problem with American Abroad novels isn't that they're badly written, but that they keep promising the same impossible thing?
Bobuq Sayed's No God but Us apparently "reinvents the modern American Abroad novel," according to Electric Literature, but I keep thinking about what needs reinventing in the first place. We've been telling this story for over a century now. Americans leave, Americans find themselves, Americans come back changed (or don't come back at all). Hemingway did it. Baldwin did it. Garth Greenwell is still doing it.
But here's what bothers me: the basic premise assumes America is the problem and elsewhere is the solution.
I'm not sure this holds up anymore, but maybe it never did. When Jake Barnes drinks his way through Paris in The Sun Also Rises, he's not escaping American masculinity. He's dragging it with him, wounded and bitter, to every café and bullfight. The geography changes. The internal weather stays the same.
Sayed seems to get this. The Electric Literature piece mentions how his novel "exposes the ugliness of American subjectivity" rather than celebrating the beauty of foreign landscapes. That word "ugliness" is doing real work here. It suggests something that can't be left behind at customs.
I think about Percival Everett's James, where the title character performs a completely different version of himself depending on who's watching.
Maybe that's what American subjectivity really is. Not some essential quality you can pack or unpack, but this constant performance of being the kind of person who deserves to be anywhere at all.
The American Abroad novel usually promises that distance creates clarity. You go to Paris or Prague or wherever, and suddenly you see yourself clearly against an unfamiliar backdrop. But what if the backdrop was never the point? What if the American self is so constructed, so performed, that it travels perfectly intact?
I haven't read Sayed's book yet, but I'm curious whether he's actually reinventing the form or just being more honest about what it's always been: a story about people who think they can outrun themselves.
The "ugliness" part might be admitting that sometimes you can't.
