Convenience Killing

• What’s Wrong with America by Scott Bradfield
  Picador, 196 pp, £14.99, January 1994, ISBN 0 330 32249 4
• The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield
  Picador, 196 pp, £5.99, January 1994, ISBN 0 330 33412 3
• Greetings from Earth by Scott Bradfield
  Picador, 296 pp, £5.99, January 1994, ISBN 0 330 32252 4

Scott Bradfield is a campus novelist. Still just under forty, he taught for five years at the University of California at Irvine while getting his PhD in American literature. He then took a job at a worthy but less prestigious school – Storrs University in Connecticut, where he now teaches English. While earning his degree and his bread in the classroom, Bradfield has, over the last ten years, put together an impressive corpus of fiction comprising two novels and a collection of short stories. All his long and short fiction is set in California, the quintessential place: ‘California is America squared,’ one of his characters says. ‘It’s the place where you go to find more America than you ever thought possible.’ The more astringent New England milieu seems not yet to have penetrated into Bradfield’s fiction.