In Fife, dreaming of America

The Scottish poet John Burnside’s new novel distils a lifetime’s fascination with the United States, finds Duncan White

who dissent in a century drunk on violence.

Fittingly, the novel begins with a hangover. As we know from Burnside’s brilliantly frank memoirs, this is a phenomenon with which he is well acquainted, having struggled with alchohol and drug addiction earlier in his life. In the opening pages of Ashland & Vine, the sufferer is Kate Lambert who, with a “mouth like sandpaper and cramps in my legs”, is pounding the pavements of Scarsville, Illinois, trying to persuade the locals to answer the 11 questions given by her boyfriend, Laurits, a film-maker.

It is the late Nineties and Kate has just returned to study at the local university after the death of her father and has been drinking heavily to cope. Laurits wants her to collect people’s stories for a mysterious project, but no one wants to speak to her. Then, drawn in by the fairy-tale sound of chopping wood, Kate finds a house that is not on her map.

The wood chopper is an elderly woman called Jean Culver, who, despite her brusque manner, offers to tell Kate her story on one condition: “You must promise to stop drinking for five days.” Like a 12-step Scheherazade, Jean’s deal is: sobriety for stories.

Kate cleans up and Jean begins to talk. She tells of her childhood in small-town Alabama and the shooting of her father, Thomas Culver, an upright lawyer who stood in the way of a dodgy land deal. She tells of her tormented brother Jeremy, who fought in the Second World War and Korea before working as an intelligence officer. Over seemingly endless cups of herbal tea, Jean goes on to tell of Jeremy’s children. Jennifer, her gifted niece, became a Sixties radical, vanished off the grid and joined the terrorist group Weather Underground. Her brother Simon, less gifted, followed his father into the military but, after serving in Vietnam, also disappeared.

Jean tells her tales carefully, withholding details of her own past. Kate meanwhile, invigorated by her mugs of buckthorn and honeybush, realises strange things are going on with Laurits, who seems mixed up in something sinister. The way that Burnside layers these stories is masterful, and becomes a meditation on storytelling itself. It also lends the novel a strangeness of scale, both ambitious and intimate: it is a novel that ranges across American history from the confines of Jean’s kitchen.

The only point of resistance is Kate’s narrative voice. Even if you buy her premature wisdom