Fletcher embarks on his journey into what he calls the ‘second America’. Beginning in Washington DC, his home for seven years, in the east, travelling down through Appalachia into the deep south and across into Texas, before heading north west through New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada ultima

The very nature of the subject matter in relation to the author, and given the author’s previous employment, inevitably lends the prose a detached, journalistic feel. The focus remains on the people and places that Fletcher ‘finds’ along his way and his sympathetic character descriptions avoid turning the journey into simply a list of American eccentricities. As a reader we are only able to experience what Fletcher allows us to experience – we are at one removed from the events, everything is seen through his eyes. This means an account such as Almost Heaven can also be interpreted as a self reflexive account, providing us with an insight into the author as much as it provides insight into the American countryside.

The pace is too quick to be called leisurely but at the same time nothing about Almost Heaven is hurried. Fletcher travels in a second hand car, ‘a battered old Dodge Colt that I’d bought for $3,600 the week I’d arrived in America seven years earlier’, and deliberately avoids interstates, preferring instead the virtually deserted back roads the interstates were designed to make obsolete. On more than one occasion reference is made to the pleasure of the drive, getting from a to b; something usually perceived as a chore to be put up with or a necessary evil of travelling, becomes integral to the enjoyment of the experience as a whole. A 150 mile drive from Cattron County to Navajoland through a snowstorm is not described as long, tedious or even dangerous but, as having a ‘dream-like quality. It was as if I had travelled through a long white tunnel and emerged in an entirely different continent’ and elsewhere we read of a westward drive in-land from the Atlantic coast, ‘I had a wonderful day. I meandered 200 miles through the heart of rural Georgia’. The unhurried approach lends the book a comfortable but not casual feel; there is always the sense of progression despite the relaxed nature of the prose.

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