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A review by maggierachael
Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel by Suzanne Roberts
1.0
God do I hate it when white women try to be deep about world travel.
Suzanne Roberts’ new novel, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel sounds promising when you read its summary: the novel “takes [readers] across four continents to fifteen countries, showing [them] what not to do when traveling.” It sounds like any other armchair travel book - lush descriptions of exotic locales, fascinating stories about wildlife and culture and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. It came off alluringly enough that I picked up a digital ARC without a second thought...and turned out to be massively disappointed.
From page one, it’s difficult to escape the clearly well-off position Roberts is writing this book from. Sure, she says she’s not wealthy - not enough to afford Louis Vuitton luggage, as she notes in her Vegas anecdote - but to travel as extensively as she does speaks of a kind of luxury only afforded to a small percentage of people. Most people, even single women, don’t get the opportunity to travel outside the country even once in their lives, and that fact presses hard on the entire thesis of this book. Life lessons learned in India or Greece or Mexico are difficult to sympathize with when most people’s idea of a vacation involves Disney World at best, and usually with their entire family rather than solo. Roberts traveling and the frivolous choices she makes on her way posit an upper middle class vision of the world without leaving a foot in the door for everyone else to get in, and thus leaves a bad taste in the readers’ mouth before they’ve even gotten to the main course.
And I say this as someone who’s done extensive traveling. Living in and exploring the places I’ve been in Europe has helped me find myself, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have money, or that my study abroad program wasn’t entirely tuition-funded. And going to Europe doesn’t make me qualified to talk about deep universal truths like Roberts feels going to Panama has -I just know that because I have ADHD, my brain does better in a stimulating city environment, and that’s a good enough truth for me. The six months I lived in London certainly aren’t enough to make a book out of.
And yet, I’m fairly certain that the time I saw a guy dressed as Freddie Mercury in drag on the Tube was a more enriching cultural experience than the entirety of this book.
Roberts sections Bad Tourist into short highlights from various locations, each with a different story. I appreciated the brevity that kept me moving through the book, but each snippet of a story
was too short to really glean any kind of moral lesson or understanding from, and the writing comes off as a shallow imitation of better travelogues by hitting the same basic “I am a privileged white lady who is learning about my privilege from the horrors of the non-Western world” beats as every travel novel I’ve ever read. The stories are out of order chronologically and follow no real organized form, and Roberts doesn’t even go so far as to explain how these events affected her life as a whole — they just play out like pieces of a film left on the cutting room floor, entirely alone and without the context needed to understand them properly.
Even the anecdotes themselves feel out of order and shoddily spliced together. Roberts will start to tell one tale, then jump back days or weeks earlier in the same trip to give important background that she really could’ve just started out with. It feels messy, not dissimilar to notes jotted down on a phone’s notes app and never sent through a proper editing process. I zoned out and skimmed paragraphs on more than one occasion and didn’t feel like I was missing a single thing.
And I’m sorry, ma’am, but admitting to cheating on your husband in the first quarter of the book isn’t going to help your already poor case, guilty feelings or not.
For a travel memoir, perhaps a good seventy percent of this book focuses on Roberts’ love life. And while it does come with the package as part of the subtitle, the amount of time she spends bemoaning her relationship status and her endless string of foreign one-night stands overwhelms most of the travel aspects of the overall story, enough to make me regret starting it in the first place.
I fully, truly do not care about your cavalcade of boyfriends, Suzanne Roberts. They all seem exactly the same — depthless, annoying caricatures meant to make you look good in hindsight — and after the fourth nearly-identical story with the names switched out, I almost didn’t finish Bad Tourist entirely. You say, “I defined myself through the male gaze”, as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation, and not something that every woman has to learn to unsee themselves through as part of growing up. There’s no need to detail the sordid, gross details of a bunch of one night stands in order to get that across, particularly not in a book supposedly about travel. You talk of not wanting to harp on self-flagellation, and yet that’s exactly what rolls off your writing in waves — by repeating the same anecdotes over and over again,you make your self-shaming public in order to feel some amount of gratitude for yourself, or perhaps a justification for not having any self-confidence.
(As someone with anxiety, I understand that struggle, but at least I try to tamp down my victim complex because of it.)
Additionally, I can’t help but cringe at Roberts’ descriptions of the environments she’s found herself in throughout her life, though she claims to understand that she comes from a place of privilege. Her visuals of the locals she encounters in each of the fifteen countries are no more than paper cutouts, flimsy stereotypes of poverty and exoticism that play up every racist idea ever held by western society - from pickpockets in Central America and beggars in India to alluring men in Greece who speak little to no English. The adults don’t speak English, all of the children are criminals or sex workers, and not one honest portrayal of a non-white individual is offered in the entire book.
This is a woman who argued the price of a French manicure in a foreign country, for goodness sake. Once you reach that point, I refuse to believe that you understand your own privilege.
(Notably, a majority of the places mentioned in this novel are neither European nor English speaking — perhaps in an attempt to make it feel ~exotic~ and special, when really it just comes off as aggressively racist any time she encounters anyone who isn’t a native English speaker. And if it’s not that, it’s coming off as an outdated brand of feminism where it’s still cool for women to judge each other like cheap plastic Regina Georges in place of a plot.)
I’m bummed that my first ever NetGalley arc turned out to be as disappointing as it was. I’m usually a fan of essay collections, but this feels unfinished and poorly constructed, and perhaps comes from a perspective that we’ve had more than enough writing from already.
Suzanne Roberts’ new novel, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel sounds promising when you read its summary: the novel “takes [readers] across four continents to fifteen countries, showing [them] what not to do when traveling.” It sounds like any other armchair travel book - lush descriptions of exotic locales, fascinating stories about wildlife and culture and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. It came off alluringly enough that I picked up a digital ARC without a second thought...and turned out to be massively disappointed.
From page one, it’s difficult to escape the clearly well-off position Roberts is writing this book from. Sure, she says she’s not wealthy - not enough to afford Louis Vuitton luggage, as she notes in her Vegas anecdote - but to travel as extensively as she does speaks of a kind of luxury only afforded to a small percentage of people. Most people, even single women, don’t get the opportunity to travel outside the country even once in their lives, and that fact presses hard on the entire thesis of this book. Life lessons learned in India or Greece or Mexico are difficult to sympathize with when most people’s idea of a vacation involves Disney World at best, and usually with their entire family rather than solo. Roberts traveling and the frivolous choices she makes on her way posit an upper middle class vision of the world without leaving a foot in the door for everyone else to get in, and thus leaves a bad taste in the readers’ mouth before they’ve even gotten to the main course.
And I say this as someone who’s done extensive traveling. Living in and exploring the places I’ve been in Europe has helped me find myself, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have money, or that my study abroad program wasn’t entirely tuition-funded. And going to Europe doesn’t make me qualified to talk about deep universal truths like Roberts feels going to Panama has -I just know that because I have ADHD, my brain does better in a stimulating city environment, and that’s a good enough truth for me. The six months I lived in London certainly aren’t enough to make a book out of.
And yet, I’m fairly certain that the time I saw a guy dressed as Freddie Mercury in drag on the Tube was a more enriching cultural experience than the entirety of this book.
Roberts sections Bad Tourist into short highlights from various locations, each with a different story. I appreciated the brevity that kept me moving through the book, but each snippet of a story
was too short to really glean any kind of moral lesson or understanding from, and the writing comes off as a shallow imitation of better travelogues by hitting the same basic “I am a privileged white lady who is learning about my privilege from the horrors of the non-Western world” beats as every travel novel I’ve ever read. The stories are out of order chronologically and follow no real organized form, and Roberts doesn’t even go so far as to explain how these events affected her life as a whole — they just play out like pieces of a film left on the cutting room floor, entirely alone and without the context needed to understand them properly.
Even the anecdotes themselves feel out of order and shoddily spliced together. Roberts will start to tell one tale, then jump back days or weeks earlier in the same trip to give important background that she really could’ve just started out with. It feels messy, not dissimilar to notes jotted down on a phone’s notes app and never sent through a proper editing process. I zoned out and skimmed paragraphs on more than one occasion and didn’t feel like I was missing a single thing.
And I’m sorry, ma’am, but admitting to cheating on your husband in the first quarter of the book isn’t going to help your already poor case, guilty feelings or not.
For a travel memoir, perhaps a good seventy percent of this book focuses on Roberts’ love life. And while it does come with the package as part of the subtitle, the amount of time she spends bemoaning her relationship status and her endless string of foreign one-night stands overwhelms most of the travel aspects of the overall story, enough to make me regret starting it in the first place.
I fully, truly do not care about your cavalcade of boyfriends, Suzanne Roberts. They all seem exactly the same — depthless, annoying caricatures meant to make you look good in hindsight — and after the fourth nearly-identical story with the names switched out, I almost didn’t finish Bad Tourist entirely. You say, “I defined myself through the male gaze”, as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation, and not something that every woman has to learn to unsee themselves through as part of growing up. There’s no need to detail the sordid, gross details of a bunch of one night stands in order to get that across, particularly not in a book supposedly about travel. You talk of not wanting to harp on self-flagellation, and yet that’s exactly what rolls off your writing in waves — by repeating the same anecdotes over and over again,you make your self-shaming public in order to feel some amount of gratitude for yourself, or perhaps a justification for not having any self-confidence.
(As someone with anxiety, I understand that struggle, but at least I try to tamp down my victim complex because of it.)
Additionally, I can’t help but cringe at Roberts’ descriptions of the environments she’s found herself in throughout her life, though she claims to understand that she comes from a place of privilege. Her visuals of the locals she encounters in each of the fifteen countries are no more than paper cutouts, flimsy stereotypes of poverty and exoticism that play up every racist idea ever held by western society - from pickpockets in Central America and beggars in India to alluring men in Greece who speak little to no English. The adults don’t speak English, all of the children are criminals or sex workers, and not one honest portrayal of a non-white individual is offered in the entire book.
This is a woman who argued the price of a French manicure in a foreign country, for goodness sake. Once you reach that point, I refuse to believe that you understand your own privilege.
(Notably, a majority of the places mentioned in this novel are neither European nor English speaking — perhaps in an attempt to make it feel ~exotic~ and special, when really it just comes off as aggressively racist any time she encounters anyone who isn’t a native English speaker. And if it’s not that, it’s coming off as an outdated brand of feminism where it’s still cool for women to judge each other like cheap plastic Regina Georges in place of a plot.)
I’m bummed that my first ever NetGalley arc turned out to be as disappointing as it was. I’m usually a fan of essay collections, but this feels unfinished and poorly constructed, and perhaps comes from a perspective that we’ve had more than enough writing from already.