BOOK OF THE DAY: Bill McSweeneyreviews The New America, by Mark Little, New Island, 242pp, € 14.95
THE BLURB captures the style and the message: "A new America is emerging from the perpetual motion which defines the world's most inspiring and infuriating nation."
The author invites us to be witness to the creation of a momentous event in the sunbelt states where, as he says, "the American dream is being turbo-charged and transformed".
By the end of the book it is still not clear what this means. Mark Little is in reporter mode.
If readers feel cheated of the evidence and analysis which would reveal the "turbo-charging" and "transformation" signalled in his title and introduction, however, they will be recompensed by the fascinating human stories which knit the narrative together.
The book is about the places and the communities around the southern states of New Mexico and Arizona which Little visited during his tenure as RTÉ's Washington correspondent.
Each of the 10 chapters concerns the people he met in different locations bordering the desert cities of the sunbelt, and aims to draw out an underlying truth about America from the evidence of their lifestyle and attitudes. The first thing he
wants us to notice about
the expanding migrant populations he encounters is the existence and growth of a new phenomenon called the "boomburb".
Take the township of Surprise, near Phoenix, Arizona, or its sister satellite of Mesa, with almost half a million inhabitants. How do we label communities of this size in places which were desert hamlets 20 years ago?
In line with some town planners in the US, Little sees this as a problem.
"The word 'suburb' has long been irrelevant in analysing exploding cities like Surprise," he writes. But he doesn't explain why.
Why will it do for Maynooth and Greystones, Slough or Watford, we might ask, but not for their ilk in Arizona?
Where once we made do with suburbs, then we got exurbs, and penturbs - Little missed out on technoburbs and baddaboomburbs - and now demographers and planners tell us we need boomburbs (try saying it aloud) to define the peculiar social phenomenon lurking behind the triple glaze of the windows and the arch of the shopping mall.
"All along the Sunbelt Frontier," Little writes, "boomburbs are becoming forces to be reckoned with . . . you could argue that they reveal more about the inner workings of the 'indispensable nation' than Los Angeles, New York or Washington."
Happily, Little doesn't try to press that argument too strongly and contents himself and his readers with the stories gleaned from interviews and casual observations made in his hot, desert boomburbs.
"It's so hot," Pastor Lee told his sweating congregation in a town called Radiant, "you get condensation on your butt from the hot water in the toilet bowl."
Little's delight in America and his enthusiasm for the energy and optimism in the racially mixed towns and cities of the southwest come as a refreshing change from the litany of horrors which characterises some 90 per cent of the commentary on America since the beginning of the Bush administration.
His enthusiasm for the culture and his eagerness to communicate its virtues lead him to flights of rhetorical fantasy: "Today, the Sunbelt Frontier is the crucible of a new American identity."
I doubt it.
We may or may not be witness to The New America; Mark Little's America would have been a better title.
It's a delightful read and a welcome antidote to the gloom that pervades that astonishing country.
If it is indeed "the world's most inspiring and infuriating nation", as he says it is, then infuriated Americans and Europeans can find here some grounds to hope for better times.
• Bill McSweeney is research fellow in International Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin