I’m excited and a little nervous about the publication of The Call of the Weird in the United States. For an outsider, there are always going to be hazards associated with trying to explain America to Americans, and even more so when you have a French-sounding name. The goodwill with which Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America is regarded seems to have been exhausted by a succession of twentieth-century émigrés—from Britain, France, Romania, and elsewhere—making windy generalizations from Cadillacs. The formula is by now so well established that Garrison Keillor not so long ago derided Bernard-Henri Lévy’s account of his journey in Tocqueville’s footsteps, American Vertigo, as yet another example of “the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists” and listed the mandatory stop-offs of such a trip—Sun City, the Mall of America, a megachurch, Graceland, Dealey Plaza, the adult movie awards, a legal brothel . . .
Thankfully, my aim in these pages is slightly different. If anything, this book was conceived as a reaction and antidote to the typical Freaks and Fatties tour—or perhaps a more honest version of it. For ten years I made TV documentaries about offbeat American subcultures (gangsta rap, the porn industry, etc.), attempting to immerse myself in their unusual worlds and understand their motivations. Over time I had the urge to cover my stories with more depth. I wanted to see the most intriguing people again—partly to find out how their strange lives had turned out, but also because I was curious how I really felt about them . . . and they about me. Instead of a travel book, I would be writing a book about returning, reconsidering—revisiting, literally and figuratively.
I look at America not completely from the outside nor wholly from the inside, as someone born to an American father and a British mother. I grew up in London, but every summer my family and I would visit Cape Cod for two months. For my dad, the writer Paul Theroux, this was a way to counteract the British cultural programming we received the rest of the year. A former Eagle Scout and keen kayaker, he worried we were becoming pale and effete and snobbish—in short, too English. We’d embark on a regimen of outdoor projects—build bivouacs and clear paths through the woods by machete, for example. Oddly, among the inquisitive aunts and uncles of my dad’s side of the family, my brother and I tended to become, if anything, more English, conjugating Latin verbs as a party trick, reciting fragments of Shakespeare, and behaving generally like a pair of irritating twerps. But I was at the same time breathing in the local atmosphere: watching American TV commercials, consuming America’s sugary cereals, drinking chocolate milk . . .
And so my dad’s plan worked. To this day, I’m still half-outsider, half-insider. I still admire the American virtues, the spirit of openness, selfsufficiency. (The cereal I’m less keen on.) At the same time, I am, to all appearances, British. I speak with an English accent, I enjoy drinking tea, I remain somewhat pale and effete. The upside of this for me is that, when covering stories in the U.S., I am the beneficiary of the positive prejudices about Britain that prevail here—that British people are educated and polite (if a little snooty), that we are well-disposed toward Americans because we share a common heritage, that we are maybe more inclined to be open-minded on American issues because we are not directly involved. When I’m on assignment, rather than being treated like a snooping journalist, I am sometimes treated like an exotic relation. And when I’m among extremists and enthusiasts, I find it liberates my inner American—I can whoop and be weird and imagine myself leading another life. It’s like being among family.
When The Call of the Weird came out in Britain, I was often asked why I thought America was home to so many weird people. I’d usually make reference to the country’s large population and its wide open spaces. “If you’re a religious leader,” I’d say, “it’s a lot harder to start your commune in a small, semidetached house in North West London. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Then I’d mention the unique history of America’s founding—that it was established by religious extremists as a New Jerusalem—and I’d say that that same spirit of utopianism still exists and informs the religious aspirations of some of the people here. Those extremists, who were Calvinists, and their belief in predestination spawned a capitalistic ethic that has in turn created a consumer culture where anything can be packaged and sold—a great source of weirdness.
But maybe this kind of analysis is better left to Tocqueville. The truth is, as a people, Americans are no weirder than anyone else on Earth. They—or may I say “we”?—are just more open and more organized, and these qualities mean that weirdness is more accessible here—to ordinary people who are tired of their humdrum lives and feel like trying porn as a career, and also to visiting European journalists. The normal human foibles—lust, violence, spirituality— have blossomed and formed subcultures: surrogate families with topsy-turvy systems of virtue, with their own self-sacrifice, their own idealism. America may not be weirder, but it is somewhere you can speak your mind. It is above all a place for letting the world know your desires and being unashamed. For this—as a journalist and as a human being—I am thankful.
And if, after all, I am taken as another Freaks and Fatties rubber-necker, so be it. I didn’t do Graceland, but I did visit a legal brothel.