The United States of Being : HUNTING MR. HEARTBREAK: A Discovery of America, <i> By Jonathan Raban (Edward Burlingame Books / HarperCollins: $25; 372 pp.)</i>

There is a branch of literature that falls somewhere between a writer’s imagination and his or her investigation of the world at large, and Jonathan Raban is currently one of its finest practitioners.

The son of an English minister, Raban began writing for the usual reason--he didn’t fit in anywhere else--and in the past 15 years or so he has produced, along with other work, a string of travel books (“Arabia,” “Old Glory,” “Coasting”) that are as much about self-discovery as they are about foreign lands.

It’s difficult to read Raban without being engaged. At his best, he is everything one might want in a companion--intelligent, witty, informed, and just cranky enough to establish himself as a real human being. There are times, too, when he’s a victim of the exigencies of living by the pen, and at such moments his work may seem rushed or forced, cut to fit a mold, and it loses some of its intensity.

Happily, his new book, “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak,” contains more of the former than of the latter. Taking his title from a literal translation of the surname of Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, a French immigrant who wrote an inventive appreciation of his adopted land--”Letters of an American Farmer,” published in 1782--Raban sets himself a similar task. He hopes to recapture the traditional immigrant experience and see what modern dreams it might bear, although, at least at the start, he treats this as a game --the author as a fictional creation, an Englishman playing at the role of pioneer.

Raban’s journey begins with a whiff of middle age. In earlier books, he has set off with a jaunty sense of enthusiasm, but this time around, departing from the industrial ravages of Liverpool, he seems almost reluctant to go. His first chapter, about crossing the ocean on a container ship, isn’t promising, except in its survey of immigrant literature and attitudes. Raban watches the sea, eats and drinks with the crew, and flirts with a hurricane, but he never really manages to get our pulses beating.

In Manhattan, he moves into a sublet apartment and wanders about exploring, but the essence of the city eludes him, maybe because it’s too huge and unwieldy to be dealt with, except as an idea. Raban never is short of those, and though he provides us with a mercantile history of Macy’s and several intriguing asides on the texture of life in the Big Apple, it isn’t until he heads south that “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak” hits its stride.

On the surface, Guntersville, Ala., might not appear to be a fruitful place for a writer, but Raban makes the most of it, settling into a cinder-block cabin in Polecat Hollow. The cabin is surrounded by woods, and when Raban starts receiving spooky midnight phone calls from various parties looking for “Bri,” he suffers the abstract sort of terror that sometimes unnerved Crevecoeur. It’s two centuries later, of course, but America still feels so vast and potentially savage to a European that anything could be out there lurking in the dark--cottonmouths, hungry gators, even drug dealers armed to the teeth.

The only solution, Raban decides with perfect good sense, is to rent a dog for protection, and this leads him to Janet Fotocki and her perversely charming black Labrador, Gypsy, who becomes the actor’s comic foil. Gypsy is a love dog; no one can resist her. With the mutt in tow, Raban makes the rounds of church socials and family picnics, and learns a great deal about the nature of a small Southern town toward the end of the century.

In Guntersville, the past and the present coexist in an uneasy balance. The Old South and its institutions--the Ku Klux Klan, for instance--have not been laid to rest but merely rolled up like a Confederate flag and stored temporarily in closets and attics. At the same time, though, the town’s favorite millionaire, George Kappler, owns a factory in England and dines at a local restaurant (he built it to accommodate visiting business associates) where the menu includes such dishes as filet de boeuf en chemise.

The Guntersville episodes show Raban at his most trenchant. He’s unhurried and observant. We can smell the biscuits baking and hear the bass flopping in the lake. We get to know the home folks, too, who eat well and sleep soundly. “An address in Guntersville ought to carry with it a whacking automatic discount on any health- or life-insurance policy,” Raban remarks.

As the days slowly pass, he becomes so caught up in the place that he speculates on what it might be like to turn himself into John Rayburn (an old Guntersville name) and actually stay on for a while, typing away in Polecat Hollow.

“How easy it sometimes seems,” he writes, “to walk out on one’s life and into a new one . . . given one drink too many over lunch, a trick of the light on the water, someone’s smile, and you could be shot of it. It wasn’t much of a life anyway, says our old demon, that unreconstructed addict of risk and roulette. Why not? “

This introduces a theme that ultimately comes to dominate the book. Call it an ache, or a longing. Whether consciously or not, Raban quits playing at being an immigrant and embarks on a true process of seduction, entering what he has earlier described, while in New York, as a “peculiarly American state of being, in which you were continuously aspiring, striving, becoming.” In other words, he’s ready for a change.

Raban says goodby to the South reluctantly, but he’s even more taken with his next stop, Seattle. It appeals to his temperament, which isn’t so odd, really, since the city, with its drizzly skies, its quiet streets, and its muted tones, has a distinctly English flavor--or, as Raban puts it, “Nowhere in the United States had I met such an air of gentility and reserve.” Holed up in the Josephinum Residence on Second Avenue, he borrows some furniture that Elvis left behind in 1962 and begins daydreaming in earnest, fantasizing about the picaresque novel he’s going to write, if and when he emigrates.

Koreans are among the most prominent immigrants in Seattle, and Raban does a first-rate job of interpreting their dilemma, which involves being able to avail themselves of America’s plenty (“Wha! The steaks! The hamburgers! To eat a whole piece of meat!”) without sacrificing their cultural heritage. Assimilation isn’t big on their list of desires. In fact, they worry that their children might marry Americans. It used to be that new arrivals coveted our political and religious freedoms along with our material goods, but in Raban’s account, the liberty to make a buck outweighs all other considerations.

The last leg of “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak” follows the author through the Florida Keys--terminal America--and though Raban always is excellent when he writes about boats and water, the chapter feels tacked on, as if he were sticking to a preconceived plan. His Florida isn’t as fresh as his Alabama, and some of the rogues he meets are a bit too loosely portrayed to be entirely believable. Anyway, by the book’s end, life has outwitted art, as is its habit. The ‘fictional’ Raban is about to expire, done in by his creator, who, on finishing his tour of the States, decides to leap into the future by actually moving to Seattle.

It’s this twist that gives “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak” its special character. Whether Raban has lived up to his ambitious subtitle is another matter.

In some respects, he’s too sophisticated a traveler to regard the United States with the wide-eyed wonder that his venture demands. The miles he’s logged on other projects sometimes make him impatient and overly grumpy--we know how dreary an airport can be--and get between him and his subject. And it might have helped to have a bit less celebration and a bit more interaction with people.

But these are small quibbles in the context of a large-spirited, genuinely clever piece of work, and a reader remains thankful for the many revealing, delightful and downright funny things about this country that Raban has brought to our attention.

It’s comforting to realize that the American Dream is still alive, in one form or another.