The unrealistic beauty of the Pacific Northwest:
The Pacific Northwest is an improbable landscape. When Jonathan Raban first encountered it through the writing of Bernard Malamud -- whose novel about his time in Oregon, "A New Life," is a little-known masterpiece -- he thought Malamud's description of the Willamette Valley must have been the product of an overactive imagination. How could it really be true that the richest farmland in the world would be nestled between two mountain ranges, the Cascades to the east, the Coastal Range to the west, with a desert and an ocean on just the other side of both? "It read like the landscape of allegory," Raban observes in "Driving Home," his new collection of essays -- not a real place, but something out of "the freehand, fantastic tradition of the Jewish folktale." Only years later, when Raban met a professor who knew the area, did he learn that Malamud's novel was actually something of a roman à clef, with real people to match its closed-minded, casually anti-Semitic characters, and a real landscape to match what had seemed too dramatic to be real. "No," he was told, Malamud's novel was not a work of "ambitious fabulism"; rather, "the landscape of the Pacific Northwest was in itself an unrealistic stretch of country -- it was just naturally fabulous."