Springsteen sings the Southwestern sorrow on new album

Yet when the regional writer leaves familiar ground, a certain peculiarity often materializes in his writing, perhaps even in the manner of his thought and comportment. The effect is to turn inward, to rely no longer on the smells, the sights and the sounds of the place by which he once took definition, to rely on his private heart alone. In my experience as a reader, such endeavors have met with either ringing vindication or total and unvitiated failure. My favorite Steinbeck novel, for example