Partly about America’s forgotten people and the economic and ecological disaster foisted on them by capitalist fundamentalism, Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound is also a compelling, brilliantly written (and photographed) personal journey in the slipstream of Simone De Beauvoir, Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, among others. She first took the journey in 2006 and then repeated it in 2023 it to see if things had changed, and, if so, how? The second journey like the first, on the roads less travelled through (and to) the bits of the U.S. that corporate America and the media are too embarrassed to show the rest of the world. The greyhound bus, Joanna Pocock’s preferred mode of transport, the perfect vehicle from which to see the blasted landscapes of post capitalism and the grubby and frequently dangerous bits of cities and towns from which the Greyhound buses depart. The bus stations, now, mostly without conveniences (toilets, refreshments, seats, phones), “a horror show of public space”, another example of how much has changed in sixteen years, the “failed experiment” of the U.S. in full effect. Forgotten, ignored Americans butting up against sink-or-swim capitalism that has little use for anyone poor, marginalised and not firmly plugged into the social media grid. Along the way the ruins of Detroit, the nightmarish feedlots of Texas and the wtf surreal weirdness of Las Vegas, “I simply couldn’t shake my view of Las Vegas as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe”. Book as misery memoir? Far from it as Joanna Pocock is an engaging narrator and brilliant writer whose Greyhound takes its place as assured future classic alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Simone De Beauvoir’s America Day by Day and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. Totally recommended.

Greyhound – Joanna Pocock

– publ. Fitzcarraldo Editions - £14.99

Steven Long