The Guardian

When feature writers on British newspapers dream of a better job, more often than not they are dreaming about America. The first article in this lavish collection of magazine and newspaper pieces by the American journalist Mark Bowden is 37 pages long. It is preceded by an author’s note: “This story was the late (editor of the Atlantic Monthly) Michael Kelly’s idea. I had been working on it for a few weeks, just gathering some reading material ...”

If feature writing can be roughly defined as newspaper journalism done slowly, then America is the place where it is practised in its most advanced form. First, there is the unique size and wealth of the American market, which gives publications the sales figures to pay more generously for research, writing and editing than anywhere else. Then there is the American tradition, still sometimes referred to as the New Journalism but actually almost half a century old now, of allowing feature writers to echo the techniques and ambitions of novelists. And then there is Hollywood: American journalists are probably more likely than any others to see their ink turned into big-screen thrills. Three years ago, Bowden’s reporting on the American military expedition to Somalia during the 90s became ‘Black Hawk Down’. Yet, for all the energy and achievement on display here, this collection raises as many questions as it answers about the state of features journalism in America. Most obviously, but strikingly, these pieces are not that well written.

There is an interview description of Norman Mailer, “always intently aware of where his hands are’’, and flies rising from an African elephant carcass “like a shining blue drape’’. Otherwise the prose chugs along, a gear or two above standard journalistic writing, without ever achieving the dizzy accelerations of Tom Wolfe or the ominous cruising motion of Joan Didion. The ambition in these articles lies elsewhere: in their packaging, their frequent use of white space for weighty pauses. A piece on torture during the “war on terror’’ is given showy headlines - “Big Daddy Uptown”, “Captain Crunch Versus the Tree Huggers” - for each of its subsections. If the original New Journalism was like improvised jazz, trying to reflect the complexity of the world by a loose, multi-dimensional style, then Bowden’s journalism at its worst is more like progressive rock: elaborate for the sake of it. But he is the one getting the movie deals. Judging features like these as print journalism is missing the point: consciously or not, they are also pitches for films, even halfway to being film scripts. A piece from Rolling Stone, about policemen and drug dealers in a small American town, is told in a propulsive style complete with terse dialogue, climactic scenes and an upbeat moral. Bowden’s vigorously male subject and tone - three pieces in a row here have the word “fight” in their title - probably appeal to a certain kind of Hollywood executive. So does his tendency to tell stories from the point of view of their protagonists, an innovation of New Journalism that, being highly movie-compatible, has never gone out of fashion. Then there is the way in which Bowden’s articles always explain and arrange reality in an orderly fashion. He never leaves loose ends or unanswered questions. Yet truly compelling feature writing allows a bit more mystery, acknowledges the ultimate unknowability of the world. Bruce Chatwin’s strange, fragmentary stories about distant places, Ryszard Kapuscinsky’s reports from post-colonial Africa - both might struggle to satisfy American magazines, but they contain truths you rarely find in Rolling Stone.