How can a man think he's seen America if he refuses to get out of his car? Bill Bryson perfectly embodies what Wendell Berry would describe as a "failure to encounter": Bryson doesn't encounter America. He doesn't find it. He treats it like a disposable tissue, with as little interest in where it came from and in where it's going. Our nation does have a problem in rampant, mindless consumption, but along with our (possibly fatal) flaws are millions of fascinating people, good hearts, heartbreaking tales, catastrophic disasters, systematic abuses of horror and hatred, and sublime skies and lands which claim our devotion even when our nation's history seems like one long, miserable tragedy.

How did Bryson have the audacity to write a book about America and not visit an inner-city slum? How could he fail to get out and talk to the Native Americans in South Dakota, rather than just dismissing the state as 'empty'? How could he treat the Sequoias so thoughtlessly, be so little moved by the sadness and beauty of the Old South, the haunting eeriness of West Texas, how could he miss the pretty, solid, dependable beauty of Maine, or the sorrow of loss that arises as each new suburban development imposes the same mask over the gorgeous landscape that is our home?

How did Bryson get paid for this? How did he miss his own country? I cannot understand.

As an experiment, if you ever decide you might like to read this book, first pick it up and simply read the opening sentence of each chapter. If I had done so, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the rest, and I would have been just as well off.

The Lost Continent and I got off on the wrong foot. I knew something was amiss when the first chapter consisted of nothing more than Bill Bryson taking an enormous steaming dump on his home state of Iowa. Not a cutesy, ironic dump; nor even a sardonic-yet-affectionate dump; but a real, live, mean-spirited, rhetorical bowel movement. Here, I'll sum up the entire first chapter for you: Iowa is boring and all the people there are fat and slow-witted. Plopbbt. And that's Iowa, the state where his parents lived. Wait until you see what he does to Mississippi and New Mexico. Or, better yet, don't.

This was all very unpleasantly surprising, partly because of the way I've approached Bryson's written catalog in reverse chronological order. Having read A Short History of Nearly Everything, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Made in America, and At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I had formed a mental picture of Bryson as a fifty-something professorial type: rambling, erudite, a bit geeky, smart-assed but in a wry, self-effacing manner, with a fierce populist streak.

With that expectation in mind, The Lost Continent was a shock, as it is the work of a thirty-something Bryson, snarky and evidently angry. And I generally like snark and anger: Anthony Bourdain is one of my favorite writers. But where Bourdain leavens his writing with humor and occasional tenderness, The Lost Continent is relentlessly negative, never passing up the opportunity to take a cheap shot.

Ironically for a book titled "travels in small-town America," Bryson appears to hate 90 percent of the small towns he visits on his road trip, speaking disapprovingly of their poverty, their inhabitants' provincial ways and funny-sounding accents, yet he waxes ecstatic over such non-small places as Savannah, Charleston, and Times Square (!). I actually agreed with quite a few of his sentiments; e.g., how tacky, inauthentic, and Disneyland-like some of our national historic sites have become, but his voice makes even those shared sentiments hard to swallow.

The last quarter of the book is the best part, as it slowly becomes apparent that this book is an elegy to his recently-deceased father, and perhaps a regret for having spent his adulthood in England rather than America, but it was honestly too little, too late for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed this book more if I'd read it when it was new, or at least before I read so much of his later, better work, but as it is, I couldn't really recommend this book to anyone, either as a first Bryson or a tenth.

If anyone can (and should!) describe this country to perfection, it’s an ex-pat—which Bill Bryson is. And does—describe the country to perfection, that is. Most of his narrative is what I’ll call tongue-in-cheek, with some of it bordering on downright sarcasm. And while I never really laughed out loud at any of his descriptions (primarily of the people we have become), I had a hard time containing my inner smirk.

tAs an aside, I must confess to feeling outright joy at my reading of the following on p. 62 (as Bryson is visiting Oxford, Mississippi): “…I have never managed to read a William Faulkner novel beyond about page 3 (roughly halfway through the first sentence), so I wasn’t terribly interested in what his house looked like.” And here I’ve been thinking all of these years (since first reading Faulkner in English 101 in 1970 at Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina), until just now, that I was the only Earthling whose antennae failed to register literary genius when reading Faulkner! As Bryson is no idiot, I felt the glow of instant solidarity with him upon reading this comment.

tBut is Bryson hemmed in by tongue-in-cheekiness? Hardly. In fact, Bryson can wax lyrical with the best of ‘em when he has a mind to. We find a splendid example of his lyrical side when he describes, on p. 93, the scene before him just outside of Cherokee, North Carolina: “(t)he Smoky Mountains themselves were a joy. It was a perfect October morning. The road led steeply up through broad-leaved forests of dappled sunshine, full of paths and streams, and then, higher up, opened out to airy vistas. All along the road through the park there were lookout points where you could pull the car over and go ‘ooh!’ and ‘wow!’ at the views. They were all named for mountain passes that sounded like condominium developments for yuppies—Pigeon Gap, Cherry Cove, Wolf Mountain, Bear Trap Gap. The air was clear and thin and the views were vast. The mountains rolled away to a distant horizon, gently shading from rich green to charcoal blue to hazy smoke. It was a sea of trees—like looking out over a landscape from Colombia or Brazil, so virginal was it all. In all the rolling vastness there was not a single sign of humanity, no towns, no water towers, no plume of smoke from a solitary farmstead. It was just endless silence beneath a bright sky, empty and clear apart from one distant bluish puff of cumulus, which cast a drifting shadow over a far-off hill.”

tWould you call me crazed if I voiced the suspicion that Bryson’s joy in witnessing this scene of pristine beauty might just possibly have derived from the absence of “a single sign of humanity?” And yes, I suppose he allows his Brysonian displeasure to hold back any wayward tears of joy with “mountain passes that sounded like condominium developments for yuppies.” Sheesh! Bill Bryson should spend a few hours in second millennium anno domini Brooklyn if he wants to get a real idea of what sounds “like condominium developments for yuppies!”

tPerhaps a final (if lengthy!) quote from p. 232 will give you a good idea of how Bill Bryson’s mind and pen work—and of how he sees not only this lost continent, but the slow loss of the entire Western world. “I left Santa Fe and drove west along Interstate 40. This used to be Route 66. Everybody loved Route 66. People used to write songs about it. But it was only two lanes wide, not at all suitable for the space age, hopelessly inadequate for people in motor homes, and every fifty miles or so it would pass through a little town where you might encounter a stop sign or a traffic light—what a drag!—so they buried it under the desert and built a new superhighway that shoots across the landscape like a four-lane laser and doesn’t stop for anything, even mountains. So something else that was nice and pleasant is gone forever because it wasn’t practical—like passenger trains and milk in bottles and corner shops and Burma Shave signs. And now it’s happening in England, too. They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough—the red phone boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There’s almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren’t practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman at the back) and that is uneconomical, so they have to go. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.”

tAs I said in my review of The Road to Little Dribbling, n  The Lost Continentn is also not n  A Short History of Nearly Everythingn—but then nothing is. The Lost Continent, however, certainly holds its own with At Home; Neither Here Nor There; One Summer; The Mother Tongue; and n  The Road to Little Dribblingn – i. e., the other Bill Bryson opera I’ve read and reviewed.

tGive Bryson a try, won’t you (if you haven’t already)? You won’t be disappointed.

RRB
Brooklyn, NY
04 November 2017

What a pain in the butt!

Julie and I used to take day trips north of Berkeley, and whenever we drove into a town and saw buildings that we didn’t like, we would get out our finger zap guns and make the buildings disappear. By the time we had left a town, it was beautiful. We hated strip malls, gas stations, fast food restaurants, some architecture, and telephone poles. A near perfect townt that I once saw was Etna, CA, just west of Mt. Shasta. It was not fancy, but they had no telephone poles, and they had cowboys. {It was not Etna.)

Bill Bryson begins with his own town of Des Moines, Iowa, slamming it as a piece of junk, ugly, and then slamming its women as being all fat. He thought this humorous; I did not. I have never been to Des Moines, but when I hear the name I think of how my grandmother once lived there. She was 19 at the time. I have an air brushed photo of her, and on the back of it is says 1920, Des Moines, Iowa, Nudii Photography. Yes, Nudii. The photo had fake scenery for she was standing on a clump of grass with flowers. Naked. She had once posed for Maxfield Parrish and for Native American calendars.

I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this book for I had read reviews. I had to see for myself, but I also hoped to hear some good travel stories. There were none. While I can understand Bill Bryson not liking many things about a towns, after because America gave up planning them or never had, he is wrong that any town is totally ugly. So, I am sure that even Des Moines has redeeming qualities.

Bryson admired only wealth. For example, he admired Beaufort, South Carolina, a city that I imagine was built on the backs of slaves. One where the wealthy got to live in nice mansions, and the slaves got whatever wood was left over at the job site. When I was younger, I loved going through those mansions, even seeing the slave quarters, even though I cringed, I had to see them. They were history. When we drove to South Carolina a few years ago, it wasn’t to see the mansions; it was to visit the Gullah island of St. Helena across the bridge from Beaufort. I wrote about it in my review of “The Secret of Gumbo Grove.” I much preferred seeing the island and having breakfast in a restaurant where the black cook had made the best biscuits and gravy that we had ever tasted. And I never thought once to zap anything on that island. Yet, it was not fancy.

Moving along. Bryson missed Key West. Maybe he was afraid of bridges over rough waters. I know that I was. Well, I love Key West, just not its tourists, its traffic, or the loud music in some of its restaurants. I love how they painted the town in Caribbean colors of yellow, pink, blue, green, and even some white. But what is best about Key West is its chickens. They roam everywhere. You have not been to Key West unless a chicken has landed on your breakfast table and pooped. Nor have you been there unless you shared your table with a cat.

And so, I know, I felt that I had to rewrite Bryson’s book for him, because he left Key West out, but I will not continue to do this as I do not have the time. I would also like to edit his book so I can delete his nasty comments about people, like I had done when I was a moderator on some forums, even my own. I once jokingly referied to myself as “The Deletest.”

Next, Bryson went through the Smokey Mountains and claims it to be most beautiful place in the U.S., except for its poor and ignorant people. They may be poor, but they have wisdom and know how to survive. But how does he think that it retained its beauty? Does he think that the wealthy could improve upon it by building resorts and mansions? The reason it is beautiful is because the wealthy have not been able to buy up the land. I need an aspirin.

Okay, I made a promise to myself that I was going to review each and every book I read in 2021 during 2021, and not still be writing these reviews in early March or something. I am doing okay with that, being only, at this count, about 6 books behind. But in another way, when I think about, that means reviewing at least six (could be as many as eight, depending on how much I read in the next two days) books before Friday, that makes for an exciting couple of days, which includes some busy work-stuff to get through as well.

Let’s see if I can do this and it not be completely meaningless, I mean, if I’m playing the game correctly, I’m supposed to go back to these a few years later, after I’ve forgotten all about the book itself, and get enough to trigger a memory of what I thought about it, and why.

The “why” part explains why so many of my reviews have some story from my childhood or snippet of daily life in them. It’s putting me in the frame of mind of where I’m at when reading. Granted, it all falls apart when I’m half a dozen books behind. I have to try to shoe-horn my brain into whatever it was I thought when I read the damned books.

Or whatever.

I broke my glasses over Christmas. Like, *snap*. I don’t think I have any of my old pairs with me here on the island. The two opticians I’m aware of are closed, and probably will be until the new year. I’m currently Harry Pottering the shit out of them. I’ve got enough duct tape wrapped around them to make an episode of the Mythbusters proud. You’d think that would be enough to make them usable, and they are, but only at the risk of headaches and distorted vision, because I have these frames that are meant for people who are rough on glasses, they can be twisted and bent in all sorts of weird ways and still stay true. It worked great until it didn’t, and now half my glasses are trying to bend into a shape and it’s warping them on my face, no amount of duct tape seems to be able to correct for this. So, I’m pretty fucked.

Sigh. Anyway, Bill Bryson, after whining his way across Europe in the last book of his I read, whined his way across the U.S. in this one. He complained mostly about how much he hates the locals, and how dumb, mean, poor, or ugly, they are. He seemed to have stumbled upon an epiphany that I had around the same time his book was published: America, even back in the late 80’s, when he wrote this, had a whole lot more poor people in it than you’d think. I was driving to a music festival outside Chicago after my senior year of high school with some friends, I’d just been kicked out of my house and had no idea where I was going to go when this was all over, but decided it was a worry for later,

We drove straight through, maybe 14 hours or something, and spent a lot of time off the interstate, taking state roads or shortcuts, or whatever, based on what we thought the maps we had indicated.

I was astounded how horrible everything looked. Everything seemed poorly kept, run down, vandalized, or half-assed in one way or another. Homes, stores, cars, properties in general. I realized I sort of hated everything. Traveling seemed depressing, not awesome.

Anyway, it never occurred to me to mock the people either stuck in those places, or choosing to live in them. But Mr Bryson sure did. It came off way more mean-spirited than I could still read and enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, it was still funny in parts, visiting Trump tower just after it was built and commenting on it being the tackiest thing he’d ever seen was funny, as his short stay in my home town… but still, the concept of punching-up would have done him a lot of favors.

Still, it’s an old book, I don’t know if it was him, or me, but his pettiness didn’t seem to bother me in his other books, in this one it did. I think he’s moved away from travelogues in recent years, and he’s probably mellowed since his fiery days as a young writer. So, whatever. I’ve not soured on him at all, I’ll still slowly make my way though his backlist.

Regardless, it vaguely reminded me of when Patrick Dilloway toured the U.S. several years ago and blogged about it. His was a kinder look at the crumbling society of the U.S and the people in it. And also maybe had him dealing with car troubles as well? I forget. Still, I had the thought and I can’t self-edit enough to not type out every random thought I have as I have it. But it’s all done now.

I do like my arm chair travelling with a hint of cynicism and much like Australians who are expert at taking the Mickey out of ourselves it was refreshing to see an American being able to take the piss.

He may not be politically correct but who hasn’t had a variation of the same thoughts going through their head about other tourists when travelling through touristy hot spots. I can’t express how much I enjoyed hearing about boring god awful places as much as I did during the reading of this book. When people regale me with their travel stories I usually glaze over but I was strangely riveted and the more dismal a place he visited the more fun I seemed to have!

I’m officially a Bill Bryson fan I really don’t know why it took me so long to read him but now I just want more more more! On to the next adventure!

I'm reading this in tandem with 'I'm a stranger here myself'. In this book Bryson covers ten of the lower 48 states, driving 13,978 miles. This is a whistle stop tour of small town America in the same way Paul Theroux glides through countries on the train. Even as an outsider I found this book to be particularly snarky, you couldn't accuse Bill of being sycophantic in the slightest about the old U S of A which has left some American reviewers feeling a bit miffed.There's not much dewy eyed staring at the stars and stripes cap in hand going on here. One could even say that there is a touch of the local boy done well coming back to gloat. That said he loves baseball, motels, junk food in all it's fatty sauce spurting glory, presidential history and national parks. I didn't find this as humorous or as substantial as some of his other travelogues. He doesn't chat to as many locals on this trip as he does in his later books. His writing most definitely improved in later accounts, there isn't much to admire in terms of style. I enjoyed his travels around New England, Leadville Colorado, his trips to the Islands off the east coast, his search in vain for the Melungeons a 'tri racial isolate' group found in Tennesse, Virginia, Kentucky who are of Portugese or native American ancestry. This trip is foreshadowed by his family holidays as a boy, he particularly recalls his penny pinching father and the fact that he wasn't good at map reading. I got the impression that Bill was disappointed that this trip couldn't live up to those childhood holidays but on the bright side now I'm looking forward to reading his childhood memoir 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid'.

Bill Bryson is one of those authors I just can't get enough off. I haven't picked up a book written by him yet that I haven't enjoyed thoroughly. He's so funny and engaging, even if he was talking about the most boring subject in the world I think somehow he would still manage to make it witty and interesting. Basically this book is a travelogue through the US, although it didn't particularly make me want to go and visit the US, in fact mostly the opposite. Every now and again he would come across something he did enjoy but he's mostly negative about his home country.

Still I would at some point like to go to the US, but it is not on the top of my list and this didn't move it up any higher.

Love it, as always. We share the same sense of humour Mr. Bryson.

3.5*

This was Bill Bryson's first travelogue,the journey was undertaken in 1987-88.Bryson himself came from a small town in America,Des Moines,Iowa.

He left and settled down in England.After ten years away,he returned to attend his father's funeral.It also brought back memories of his childhood road trips,and he decided to explore small town America.The journey would eventually take him to 38 US states and nearly 14,000 miles.

I was reminded of this book while reading William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways,which is also about small town America and which was published just a few years prior to The Lost Continent.That book totally bored me and I remembered that Bryson had done a much better job with the same subject.

Bryson's trademark sarcasm and humour punctuates the book.Some readers may find him too snarky,but for me,the book was good fun.Yes,he does have a mocking tone,but that's the way he writes.For example,he uses such place names as Dog water,Dunceville,Hooterville and many more.

Of course,the nature of the subject is such that many of these small towns would be rather dull.But Bryson digs up interesting tidbits and historical detail,as he does in most of his books.

Finally,after the long journey,Bryson approaches his hometown,Des Moines. He ends on an optimistic note, thinking that he could actually live happily in his hometown,which he was once so eager to leave.

3.5 stars

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who's noticed the fact that Bill Bryson is a smug bastard who casts a pall of depressing sarcasm over everything he writes about. I mean, I'm all for sarcasm in most cases, but it's as though all of his subjects are cheapened and made despicable by his prose. In The Lost Continent, he turns every small-town inhabitant into an ignorant, obnoxious caricature. The book has virtually nothing to offer, unless you, too, are hell-bent on whining about the constant ennui of middle-American travel. If you'd like a travelogue with value and interest, try Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon, who actually has some respect for his fellow human beings.

A more accurate title would be "Whinging in Small Town America", because that is all Bryson seems to do.
Having previously read and enjoyed two of his books (In a Sunburned Country and A Walk in the Woods), I was looking forward to The Lost Continent. From chapter one onwards, it was a depressing journey. All I gained from this travelogue was that Bryson hates everything: kids these days, paying for motel rooms, highways, small towns, big cities, tourists, people who are in any way different from himself, unfriendly people, friendly people, the North, South, East, West, and, to a lesser extent, the midwest. Had I not read his other books, I would suggest Bryson stays home.

Unless a theme of "Hey! Look how disgustingly poor these people are!" is your thing, skip this racist, classist book.