Keeping A Weather Eye

By John Skow

HUNTING MISTER HEARTBREAK

by Jonathan Raban

HarperCollins; 372 pages; $25

British travel writer Jonathan Raban is at his amiable best when his narrative is adrift, even awash. It is easy to see why. Sooner or later a professional journeyer meets boring people in tedious circumstances. Here the land-based pilgrim must lie entertainingly, which is hard work, or tell the ghastly truth. The writer who travels by boat need only conjure a storm, or describe his great relief that the weather is fine. The reader, charmed or alarmed, follows wide-eyed. Raban weathered bores effectively in Coasting, a wry account of a voyage around England in a small sailboat, and in Old Glory, in which he put-putted down the Mississippi in an aluminum skiff.

This new journal, also of a voyage to the New World ("Mr. Heartbreak" is J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author in 1782 of Letters from an American Farmer), is about two-fifths aqueous, which is just enough. Raban sets out from Liverpool in a giant container ship, discovers that the ocean is even larger -- good storm action here -- and then burrows for several weeks each in Manhattan, a small and sleepy Alabama burg called Guntersville and our last frontier, Seattle.

His perceptions are easygoing and unsatirical, though in New York City he does notice that the middle class spends almost no time at street level, which is left to muggers and the homeless. In Guntersville he lives with a borrowed dog (as a people-meeting device, a good substitute for a boat), hears his speech patterns slowing and finds the local religiosity more comfortable than off-putting. Now and then he does a shrewd job of reporting, as when he describes tensions among Korean immigrant men in Seattle, trying successfully to make money and unsuccessfully to rule their wives and daughters.

But journeying, not burrowing in, is Raban's job. He returns to it just in time, with a roguish last chapter set offshore in the Florida Keys. He has rented a sailboat, and the wind is up, and banks of low nimbus clouds are swarming in from the northwest. Out of sight, the Key West highway is clogged with tourists, but that's their problem. Raban's narrative scuds toward the open sea, and the beguiled reader, as always at such moments, makes plans: sell the house, buy a boat. A case of salsa and a gallon of rum. How hard can it be to write travel books?