A family of boozers and whoremongers

Why, one wonders, would a first-time novelist having been born in London, and having spent most of his adult life living in South Wales, set his narrative in mid-century America? For so is J.P. Smythe (surely one of the finest Victorian names to grace any young writer today), billed on the flyleaf of his debut offering, Hereditation. A cockney Taffy then, but one who apparently feels the need to place his family saga on the other side of the Atlantic. One hopes this is not because proper stories only happen these days in the movies or (even worse), the twentieth century American lit module of creative writing courses. But then I suppose Shakespeare was but ill-acquainted with Illyria…

First things first, this is not the Great American Novel (but how delicious if a European were to be the one to write it). Hereditation looks very much towards the American tradition though.