Scott Bradfield

Deconstructing America

In his fiction, author Scott Bradfield scratches beneath the surface of American culture -- and finds little.

An acerbic critic of the United States, author Scott Bradfield has spent a good deal of his writing career living abroad. By the age of 28 he sought refuge from the culture of California, where he was born in 1955, and headed to Europe.

There, he often complained of the tendency of untraveled Americans to whiz around the Continent in marathon fortnight trips "as if they were ticking things off a list, photographing everything and trying desperately to 'experience' every kind of continental food" only to return back home days later with a "book of photos under their arms."

Indeed, even though he grew up American, Bradfield has had little positive to say about his native land. Writing recently in the German "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung," he said he felt like a fish out of water in California. He described his escape to Europe -- where he said he found everything America didn't have -- as a kind of fantasy.

London became the first station on his literary sojourn. When he arrived in 1985, he immediately fell in love with the city. "The noise, the chaos, the intelligence and anonymity of the place -- it all seemed to be the opposite of everything that I hated about California." Bradfield later made the city his home.

The author's passionate dislike of all things American appears to be linked with his passion for the written word. "People are immediately suspicious of you if you’re a reader of ‘good’ books in America," he concluded in the German essay. "Hannibal Lecter reads books.”

Deconstructing the American dream

A devious mix of black humor and satirical barbs at the "commercialization of culture" in the Western world run through Bradfield’s books.

His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion, was published in 1989 to wild acclaim by literary critics. His writing was compared to Edward Hopper’s paintings: like the American painter, Bradfield revealed the shallowness of the American dream.

Bradfield's Animal Planet, which was published in 1994 and offers a biting parody of globalization, has often been compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm. It's a biting allegory of the new class of people -- in the guise of animals from the London Zoo -- seeking a piece of the new world order but winding up with little more than increased spending power and a supporting role as a cog in the multinational corporate machine.