Juan in America - Eric Linklater

Set in the year before the Wall Street crash, Juan in America is a classic evocation of the final mania of prohibition, as seen through equally maverick British eyes. A novel in the mode of the picaresque, this is a story of erotic discovery in the sense, as Juan puts it, that 'your trousers hide not only your nakedness but your kinship to the clown.' A nation emerging as a great power is exalting in absurdist energies. In its last spasms before the great depression, America is revealed through a series of unlikely accidents as Juan stumbles from state to state, somehow evading consequences as he goes. On his first day, he falls for the daughter of a gangster, witnesses a murder in a speakeasy and watches a woman leap to her death in a New York street. He thrills to the bizarreness of each spectacle and moves on to the next in a galloping mood that is part medieval romance, part running commentary on what was still, in the 1920s, the new world. Foreword by Alexander Linklater.