To the outsider, the culture of the United States appears deceptively accessible. Through its news-media, its literature and its popular music, its cinema and its politics, the country seems forever to be exposing itself, like a cabaret artist, like a monument, like a neon light, to the rest of the world&rsquos gaze. And yet, as Timothy O&rsquoGrady reveals to us as he undertakes a 15,000-mile journey by car, on a circuit around the perimeter of his native land, it is more complex and mysterious than almost any other nation in existence.

Starting in New York City, he works his way north and westwards, the dial of his internal radio pointing now to musicians, now to writers and thinkers, now to friends and personal reminiscences, now to details of landscape, architecture or philosophy. He stops in San Francisco and returns to Europe for eight months before resuming his journey, moving east and south, going all the way down around Florida before turning north towards New York once more.