TRAVELING MAN

Any fool with a world atlas, a stock of vivid adjectives, and a portable typewriter can get into the travel-writing game. But as Jonathan Raban last demonstrated in Old Glory (1981), what distinguishes the great travel writer is less a matter of where he goes than what he takes with him. A rambling account of the idiosyncratic Englishman's journey down the Mississippi, Old Glory gave American readers a fresh look at their own country as only an affectionate foreigner with a novelist's eye and a fondness for odd characters could portray it. Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (Nonfiction, HarperCollins, $25) (the title is borrowed from a John Berryman poem) is a companion volume of sorts. Setting out from Liverpool in a massive containerized-cargo ship called the Atlantic Conveyor, the author re-creates the experience of immigrating to the U.S. and explores ''the magical melodrama involved in becoming-and remaining-an American.'' Instead of cavorting restlessly about the landscape, he settles for a while into four strikingly different American locations-Manhattan, rural Alabama, Seattle, and the Florida Keys-and tries them on for size. Is it really possible, Raban asks, to reinvent oneself as a new man in the New World? As one would expect from a writer of his subtlety and originality, he gives no simple answer. But then, as in any quest worth undertaking, the adventure itself is its own reward. Actually, Raban seems to imply that the very concept of the American dream has almost as many meanings-for good and ill-as there are immigrants to invent it. But it's the concrete rather than the general-Raban's apparently inexhaustible curiosity about the most commonplace details of American life and lives-that makes Hunting Mister Heartbreak such a remarkable book. Nothing bores the man. Whether he's barhopping in the ''Lilliputian metropolis'' of Halifax, Nova Scotia; sitting on a Manhattan fire hydrant being ''willed into nonexistence by total strangers'' and feeling ''the force of (their) frank contempt''; or walking a levee in Guntersville, Ala., observing that all white folks fish from boats, all blacks from the bank, Raban makes even the most familiar facts seem brand-new. Even so humdrum an event as the landing of an airliner can be transformed by the author's characteristic wit. ''There is something comic about the way they lumber in so self-importantly from the sky,'' he writes. ''Their imperial obesity, their thunder and ado. They make their entrances like Tamburlaine the Scourge of God. Then, minutes later, you see them shackled up to yellow tractors, being led around the inner reaches of the terminal like great blind boobies.'' What really sets Hunting Mister Heartbreak apart from other travel narratives, though, is Raban's ability to chat up fellow immigrants of every sort-pushcart peddlers from the Ukraine, Korean rock drummers, even a runaway sea captain from Nottingham earning his fortune conducting gays-only snorkeling expeditions (''Beef on the Reef,'' his advertising fliers announce). One of a kind. A

AN EXCERPT: THE BEST OF ENEMIES Seattle liked to pride itself on its liberality of mind. While I was living there, the city, with a black population of less than 15 percent, elected Norm Rice as its first black mayor; and it was-on the whole-impressively tolerant of the immigrants and refugees. Fugitive graffiti writers dirtied the walls with vicious nonsense about gooks, chinks and slant-eyes, but the language of Seattle public life was clean. It was not a place where people could comfortably get away with the kind of xenophobia and discrimination that were | aired freely in both New York and Alabama. There was one exception to this rule-one group of immigrants who could be openly abused in bars and public places, in the newspapers and on television. They were taking our jobs. They were buying up our houses. They were responsible for the sudden rise in the crime rate. They were clogging up our freeways and straining our school system beyond its limits. They should go home where they came from. They were Californians. There was the bumper-sticker (more often talked about than actually seen on bumpers) which read, HAVE A GOOD TRIP-BACK TO CALIFORNIA. Within a few days of the first breach in the Berlin Wall, Emmett Watson, the resident grouch on the Seattle Times, proposed that Seattle should buy the wall, block by block, and rebuild it around Seattle to keep the Californians out. Billboards advertising a local beer showed a bottle, with the slogan CALIFORNIANS JUST DON'T GET IT. These Californian jokes were Seattle's chief claim to having a distinct regional humor. They acted as a useful safety-valve, allowing people in Seattle to vent their real disquiet and anger at the effects of mass immigration without being tagged as racist bigots. Californians were fair game.