Bill Bryson
And heres a hilarious example of my musings on a woman I met in a café in Vermont:
Right back at ya, Bill!
I hatefinished this terrible thing out of sheer morbid fascination, I really can't believe it got published, I read the kindle version, so I was able to do a count of the adjectives used most, And they perfectly sum up my feelings about this book:
Dull
Boring
Disappointing
Flat
Poor
Empty
Closed
Ugly
What's sad is, this author can be really funny.
I laughed out loud quite a few times, But when it came to writing this review, I couldn't remember any of those
things because the overall impression of his petty meanness was so strong,
So begins Bill Brysons book about returning to his childhood home after living in England for a decade, The above isnt that much different from what many people would write about the place where they grew up and from which they left at the first opportunity,
But theres more, He goes on to write that “hardly anyone ever leaves, This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man, ” Okay. I can see how a young man, especially one who has traded Iowa for England, might have the same reaction to the place he left,
But hes not through,
And you know what I was beginning to believe that the condescending little smart aleck probably did just that smart aleck being a euphemism for another euphemism.
Theres more:
“Iowa women are almost sensationally overweight, ”
I bet they loved reading this book in Iowa especially the women,
However:
I bet they loved reading this book in the South,
All of this is the beginning of Brysons first travel book which was published inwhen he was thirtysix years old, and still just as susceptible to boredom as he was as a child whining in the backseat of the car when the family took road trip vacations to places that he didnt like.
And the reason he didnt like them was because he lacked the imagination that would have allowed him to see beyond the monotonous scenery of certain areas that could have made him appreciate the areas history and uniqueness.
I know the above to be true because the same tendencies were apparent in the thirtysix year old man who wrote a book,
He spent a fall and a spring traveling in two huge loops one in the east and one in the west almost,miles, touching barely in many cases thirtyeight states and found most of those miles and those states to be boring.
His idea of humor was to make fun at the expense of the people he encountered, rarely ever engaging them in conversation,
Here is the lengthiest conversation with a local that he recorded in the book:
The shame is that if Ian Frazier, the author of Great Plains, had wondered about the name and why people lived in such a town, he would have found out and he would have let the reader know.
And so would have Rinker Buck, who traveled the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon from St, Joseph, Missouri all the way to Oregon, and wrote about it in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey,
Much of Bucks journey was along the Platte River in Nebraska, a state that Bryson barely nicked in the southeast corner of the state, proclaiming that “Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states.
” It isnt, but even if it was he didnt know enough about the state to make that judgment,
This was my second reading of Brysons book, I remembered that when I read it in the earlys that there was some humor that made me chuckle, but there was also much more that was so obnoxious that it made me cringe a little of that went a long way.
My reread doesnt change that assessment,
What it did do was cause me to read Great Plains for the third time and The Oregon Trail for the first time, They sit sidebyside on my “favorites” shelf, I recommend them both.
As for Bryson, he mellowed somewhat in the many books that followed, I have no way of knowing, but perhaps he received some blowback about the harshness of the humor that he resorted to at other peoples' expense, I have read nearly everything that he later wrote down through the years and the humor is still prevalent, but it has lost some of the bitter edge that characterized this book.
And thats a good thing,
Audiobook Comments
Read by William Roberts and he did a fab job, But, it's a pet peeve when an author tells such a personal story but doesn't narrate his own house,
sitelinkYouTube sitelinkBlog sitelinkInstagram sitelinkTwitter sitelinkFacebook Snapchat mirandareads “I come from Des Moines, Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you cant wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever”
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent
Give me chance to explain.
I know that Bill Bryson is a hugely successful, internationallybestselling author, I know his books are on the shelves of millions, Heck, even I own one, the entertaining, easilydigestible One Summer,
But The Lost Continent is not good, It is, in fact, an absolute bummer, I would not recommend it at any time, but especially not in these particular days of division, discord, and fear,
Part of my reaction, I see now, was shock, Shock that this superpopular writer could have produced something like this,
I stumbled across The Lost Continent quite by accident, It was on my wifes personal bookshelf, which is to say, it was in a cardboard box under our bed, and I found it while looking for a shoe,
The premise a thirtyeight state tour of America, purportedly focusing on small towns seemed charming and sweet, a marvelous opportunity to hit the backroads and find beauty in simplicity.
Sure, thered probably be some light ribbing at the expense of rural folk, yet I was certain wed ultimately end at a place of warmth and conciliation,
Well, turns out my assumptions were wrong,
This book is garbage, I hated it, with every fiber of my being, From the first page to the last, This is awful. It is spiteful, mean, heartless, uninspired, offensive, insulting, unfunny, uninterested, and dreary,
At its best, it is punching down, At its worst, it is close to hateful,
The Lost Continent is a book to take your mood, whatever it is, and drive it down, like a nail pounded into soft mud by a sledgehammer.
In other words, not the best thing to be reading in, while America falls apart, In all honesty, this might have played a part in my reaction,
As noted above, Bryson has an incredibly lofty reputation, This was also his first book, so he was probably still working on his “voice, ” But these pages many of them filled with my furious annotations feel like the work of an antiintellectual knuckledragging mouthbreather,
The execution of The Lost Continent is cold, repetitive, and soulwearying, Bryson goes to a place, spends five minutes there, declares it “boring,” and leaves in a cloud of gutterlevel playground insults, He uses that descriptor boring so many times I stopped counting, Over and over again. It is the absolute height of obnoxiousness, My threeyearold says its boring, a lot, Bryson was thirtysix when he wrote this, I would never slap my kids, Bryson, on the other handnever mind,
The only joke that works in The Lost Continent is a meta one, To wit: Bryson, despite all his sneering at the nonpeople he meets, comes off as the dumbest asshole in the realm, He adds nothing to any conversation, He does not make a single acute observation, He is a lackluster fauxadventurer who finds only one thing in each new place: a reason to despise it, Mostly, his reasons contradict themselves, The waitresses are either too friendly or not friendly enough, The hotels are either too small or too large, The small towns are either too dumpy or too perfect, In the midst of this mess of illconsidered thoughts, Bryson somehow avoids putting two ideas together, even by accident, There is not a single insight about America worth repeating,
I love road trips, Like, really, really love them, When I first got married, my wife and I blazed a path thousands of miles long through Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, and Oklahoma, sniffing out historic sites and accumulating reststop maps and collecting gas station sunglasses and having the best time of our lives.
Every day we just woke up and drove, finding someplace new, Sometimes, when our four kids are simultaneously complaining about everything in a Brysonlike manner we think back to those days, when every road was an opportunity,
You almost cant go wrong with a road trip,
With Bryson as your seatmate, though, Id prefer ThirdClass tickets on the Titanic, His gimmick is aging frat boy, a tired mélange of casual misogyny, occasional fbombs, and an inability for selfreflection the constant fatshaming of women, for instance, is odd, since based on his cover photo, he's not exactly Brad Pitt from Thelma and Louise.
One has to question how, with the road before him, a map beside him, and all the time that he needed, Bryon went into this project with the mindset of a person on a death march.
I had fair warning, within the first few pages,
Things start off badly, and get worse, Bryson begins by claiming his birthright as a Midwesterner, Specifically, he is from Des Moines, Iowa, This opening gambit is a transparent pose, For some reason, people believe that claiming membership of a group gives them an openseason license to fire at will, Here, Bryson thinks he can be as “outrageous” as he wants, since hes ostensibly just another smalltowner, no different from the people hes slagging,
But thats not true, Bryson was born in Iowa, but hes lived the majority of his life in London, and he wastes no time establishing his superiority and Anglophilia,
You see that in the way he talks about Des Moines, a description that is just at odds with reality, Yes, Des Moines is in Iowa, No, despite Brysons allegations, it is not comprised solely of overweight women at the Merle Hay Mall, Rather, it is the state capital of Iowa with a cool capitol building, a college town Drake University, founded in, and host to a unique, internationallyknown event the Drake Relays.
It is a modern city, But to hear Bryson describe it, everyone is still going potty in an outhouse, while looking upwards in abject horror whenever a flying machine passes overhead,
Bryson is clearly a brainy guy, Yet, oddly, The Lost Continent presents very little by way of factoids or trivia, in contrast to One Summer, which was constructed entirely of factoids, Here, though, Bryson is absolutely uncurious and unquestioning, Take the Merle Hay Mall, Its not just a gathering place for the overweight, Its named for Merle Hay, reputed to be the first American soldier killed in World War I, Why do I know that Because I used to drive through Des Moines on a bimonthly basis, I saw the name, thought it was interesting, and I went home and looked it up, In all the thousands of miles that Bryson traveled, I dont think he once wrote something down and said, I should look that up, In short: He. Does. Not. Care.
The Lost Continent is roughly divided into two parts: East and West, In both, the setup is the same, Bryson who has been overseas for twenty years hops in his moms Chevette and starts driving, Its a simple, excellent idea, and it jumpstarted a long and lucrative career, in which he has morphed into a beloved literary figure,
Thats quite a turn, because The Lost Continent is mostly about Bryson badmouthing all that he surveys,
Unsurprisingly, Iowa gets slammed, Surprisingly, Bryson slams it by comparing it to the Sorrentine Coast, which is in Italy, and is also a place where the land meets the ocean, Is it really fair no, strike that, Is it really coherent to compare a landlocked state to an ocean coast No, its not, That doesnt matter to Bryson, because he has only three tools in his toolbox: Fat Women Jokes Corn Jokes and Euroelitism,
Thats not entirely accurate, He also finds time for some subSeinfeld riffs on the commercials he watches in his hotel room, You havent been introduced to NotFunny until youve seen Bryson crack wise about Preparation H, Honestly, youd be better off sniffing a ton of modeling glue, rather than exposing yourself to this,
The list of places that Bryson goes is long and merges together into one endless complaint, He doesnt like Hannibal, Missouri, or Mark Twains home, He doesnt like the Mississippi River “dull” or Gettysburg “boring” or the Smokey Mountains beautiful, but too many fat tourists, Because he wants to spread his unamusing misanthropy as far as possible, he even goes to big cities Las Vegas, New York City so he can complain about them too.
Nothing can possibly please him,
The incident that really stands out is when Bryson goes to Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the entire world, Of course, he concludes it is nothing but a massive disappointment, Why, you might ask Because it is busy that is, filled with tourists who are you guessed it! “fat”, and because he got lost,
Two quick points, The first: of course its busy, its Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world, Its not some dank chippy in Lambeth where you can just sit all day by yourself in a dark corner, sipping Carling and despising everything,
The second: Bryson getting lost is his own stinking fault, I went to Yosemite with friends some years ago, Since it was packed being one of the most beautiful, etc, etc. , we drove directly to the Ranger Station, and simply asked the Ranger where we could go to get away from the crowds, The Ranger answered our question, and we hiked for five days, With the exception of the day we went up Half Dome, we didnt see another soul, The point, of course, is that Yosemite is massive, You can get lost in it and not on the roads, like Bryson, but in the miles and miles and miles of backcountry paths, Bryson, though, goes to this place of incredible wonder and beauty, and is just disgusted, because there are others around him, Then he leaves and goes to a crappy hotel room to drink beer and watch television, like he does every night, If he had put forth the minutest effort, instead of whinging about every damn thing, he might have experienced something, Thats not his way, though, He prefers to take driveby potshots at the world which he clearly believes is meant for him alone, without ever getting out of his Chevette and interacting with his environment.
It is striking how few people Bryson actually speaks with in the course ofinterminable pages, Unlike Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic which is how you do a travelmemoir, Bryson cant engage in any meaningful interactions, This is not terribly shocking, since he comes off as a gaseous prick,
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning, as it is symptomatic of Brysons extremely dark view of humanity, To him, the people in these small towns are not people at all, They are creatures. They are lower lifeforms without thoughts, dreams, loves, interests, ambitions, The way he writes about them is almost a literary cleansing, a condescension so vast and powerful that it denies men and women their basic humanity, The funny thing is, the joke is on Bryson, Published in, we are now in the midst of a fullfledged culture war pitting urban Americans against rural Americans, The Lost Continent was not the cause, of course, But it was a harbinger, It turns out that a lot of Americans knew exactly what smug elites like Bryson were saying all along, It alienated them, and that alienation has turned to anger,
Somewhere along the line, Bryson must have changed, At the very least, his persona must have changed, Im making this assumption because I get Bryson recommendations all the time, Almost everyone I know has A Walk in the Woods on their shelves, This includes people who would not be okay with the way that Bryson talks about poverty and poor people including snide remarks to beggars about having “no dignity” or the way he refers to Truman Capote as “a mincing little fg.
”
Aside: Brysons views on poverty are both thoughtless, heartless, and factless, Indeed, there are times this feels like a highschool kid's unfortunate Twitter feed the kind you eventually erase, hoping no one saw it rather than the work of a middleage man who should know better.
I have not looked into the matter, but I wonder if Bryson realized that childhood and nostalgia would work better and sell more books than this toxic stew.
I wonder if he did the calculations and changed his style accordingly, If he did, only he can say if the change was more than skin deep,
To be fair though I shouldnt have to be fair Bryson isnt the final third of The Lost Continent is more palatable, This covers the time heading west, rather than east, and he lightens up a bit, acknowledges some of his own shortcomings, and also manages a glimmer ofwell, its not happiness, per se, but its a step above his usual griping.
The final page is beautifully written, and if the book had used that tone rather than being the exact opposite of that tone this might have been a great book, rather than one of the worst Ive ever encountered.
It also wouldve helped if there had been more of Brysons dad, a figure who appears far too infrequently, and seems a much better traveling companion, Brysons dad was excited to go places, excited to meet people, excited to be on the road,
The final thing I have to say I promise is that travel is an incredible privilege, Aside from being extremely fun, it is also among the finest ways that exist in our universe to make connections and create empathy across the lines national, cultural, racial, economic, religious that separate us.
It is an absolute shame that Bryson took this gift this gift of opportunity, of time, of ability to make his journey a parade of nastiness, In all his miles, he never found any common ground he found only chasms, In all his miles, he never shared an awesome sight he felt only bitterness that sights had to be shared, In all his miles, he never once seemed truly happy,
As a result, The Lost Continent is awfully sad, on top of everything else, .
which a bilious Bryson, returning to the U, S. after living in England, borrows his moms car with her permission and sets out to find the perfect American small town,
Bryson kind of loses focus of his main task along the way, but that doesnt prevent him from slinging his jibes atof the lower U, S. states.
This ones almost as funny as the other Bryson books Ive read, but he seems to have a stick up his behind for most of it and the sometimes nasty barbs at middle Americans lose steam fairly quickly.
A nice quota of belly laughs are found herein, but youll be shaking your head and saying, “What the Hell, Bill” more often than not,
Hey, I just remembered I don't like Bill Bryson,
I made it all the way to the end of the first CD, just to be certain I wasn't mistaken about my opinion, and nope, I wasn't,
I still don't like Bill Bryson,
This is especially repugnant coming straight off sitelinkSomething Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
Note to self: Please stop trying with this guy, You do not like him, You never have, you never will, 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 hasnt had a variation of the same thoughts going through their head about other tourists when travelling through touristy hot spots.
I cant 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!
Im officially a Bill Bryson fan I really dont know why it took me so long to read him but now I just want more more more! On to the next adventure! This was Bill Bryson's first travelogue,the journey was undertaken in.
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 toUS states and nearly,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,
.Bill Bryson was born in Iowa but, as he reminds you frequently, he moved to England and now hes just way better than you, I would like to have been present during his pitch for this book:
Bill Bryson: I went back to America in the early spring, when it was still cold and almost everything was closed.
I borrowed my mothers car and then drove all over the country acting like a twat, I insulted everyone I saw and complained nonstop, especially about the fact that it was cold and everything was closed and/or too expensive,
Heres one of my witty observations, when I finally happened upon a tourist spot that was open, and I wasnt too cheap to pay for it:
I dont think I had ever been to a place quite so ugly, and it was jammed with tourists, almost all of them ugly also fat people in noisy clothes with cameras dangling on their bellies.
Why is it, I wondered idly, as I nosed the car through the throngs, that tourists are always fat and dress like morons
And heres a hilarious example of my musings on a woman I met in a café in Vermont:
I listened to a fat young woman with a pair of illkempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter.
Harvey, hes been at Fibberts for three years and hes only just got his first raise, It didnt sound as if God had blessed Harvey very much, Even his kids were ugly as sin, I was half tempted to give one of them a clout myself as I went out of the door, There was just something about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him,
Right back at ya, Bill!
I hatefinished this terrible thing out of sheer morbid fascination, I really can't believe it got published, I read the kindle version, so I was able to do a count of the adjectives used most, And they perfectly sum up my feelings about this book:
Dull
Boring
Disappointing
Flat
Poor
Empty
Closed
Ugly
What's sad is, this author can be really funny.
I laughed out loud quite a few times, But when it came to writing this review, I couldn't remember any of those
things because the overall impression of his petty meanness was so strong,
I come from Des Moines, Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you cant wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.
So begins Bill Brysons book about returning to his childhood home after living in England for a decade, The above isnt that much different from what many people would write about the place where they grew up and from which they left at the first opportunity,
But theres more, He goes on to write that “hardly anyone ever leaves, This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man, ” Okay. I can see how a young man, especially one who has traded Iowa for England, might have the same reaction to the place he left,
But hes not through,
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didnt come from anywhere else in Iowa.
By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, During the annual state highschool basketball tournament, when the hayseeds from out in the state would flood into the city for a week, we used to accost them downtown and snidely offer to show them how to ride an escalator or negotiate a revolving door.
And you know what I was beginning to believe that the condescending little smart aleck probably did just that smart aleck being a euphemism for another euphemism.
Theres more:
“Iowa women are almost sensationally overweight, ”
I bet they loved reading this book in Iowa especially the women,
However:
Above all, Iowans are friendly, You go into a strange diner in the South and everything goes quiet, and you realize all the other customers are looking at you as if they are sizing up the risk involved in murdering you for your wallet and leaving your body in a shallow grave somewhere out in the swamps.
I bet they loved reading this book in the South,
All of this is the beginning of Brysons first travel book which was published inwhen he was thirtysix years old, and still just as susceptible to boredom as he was as a child whining in the backseat of the car when the family took road trip vacations to places that he didnt like.
And the reason he didnt like them was because he lacked the imagination that would have allowed him to see beyond the monotonous scenery of certain areas that could have made him appreciate the areas history and uniqueness.
I know the above to be true because the same tendencies were apparent in the thirtysix year old man who wrote a book,
He spent a fall and a spring traveling in two huge loops one in the east and one in the west almost,miles, touching barely in many cases thirtyeight states and found most of those miles and those states to be boring.
His idea of humor was to make fun at the expense of the people he encountered, rarely ever engaging them in conversation,
Here is the lengthiest conversation with a local that he recorded in the book:
I was headed for Cairo Illinois, which is pronounced Kayro, I dont know why. At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did,
Because thats its name, he explained as if I were kind of stupid,
But the one in Egypt is pronounced KiRo,
So, Ive heard, agreed the man,
And most people, when they see the name, think Kiro, dont they
Not in Kayro they dont, he said a little hotly,
There didnt seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still dont know why the people call it “Kayro.
” Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it,
The shame is that if Ian Frazier, the author of Great Plains, had wondered about the name and why people lived in such a town, he would have found out and he would have let the reader know.
And so would have Rinker Buck, who traveled the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon from St, Joseph, Missouri all the way to Oregon, and wrote about it in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey,
Much of Bucks journey was along the Platte River in Nebraska, a state that Bryson barely nicked in the southeast corner of the state, proclaiming that “Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states.
” It isnt, but even if it was he didnt know enough about the state to make that judgment,
This was my second reading of Brysons book, I remembered that when I read it in the earlys that there was some humor that made me chuckle, but there was also much more that was so obnoxious that it made me cringe a little of that went a long way.
My reread doesnt change that assessment,
What it did do was cause me to read Great Plains for the third time and The Oregon Trail for the first time, They sit sidebyside on my “favorites” shelf, I recommend them both.
As for Bryson, he mellowed somewhat in the many books that followed, I have no way of knowing, but perhaps he received some blowback about the harshness of the humor that he resorted to at other peoples' expense, I have read nearly everything that he later wrote down through the years and the humor is still prevalent, but it has lost some of the bitter edge that characterized this book.
And thats a good thing,
As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you, ' And I always used to think, 'So'Bryson returns to England after ten years and decides to take a road trip full of nostalgic stops, He reflects on many a good adventure with his family and, in particular, his father, Wholly entertaining and engaging!
Audiobook Comments
Read by William Roberts and he did a fab job, But, it's a pet peeve when an author tells such a personal story but doesn't narrate his own house,
sitelinkYouTube sitelinkBlog sitelinkInstagram sitelinkTwitter sitelinkFacebook Snapchat mirandareads “I come from Des Moines, Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you cant wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever”
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent
Give me chance to explain.
I know that Bill Bryson is a hugely successful, internationallybestselling author, I know his books are on the shelves of millions, Heck, even I own one, the entertaining, easilydigestible One Summer,
But The Lost Continent is not good, It is, in fact, an absolute bummer, I would not recommend it at any time, but especially not in these particular days of division, discord, and fear,
Part of my reaction, I see now, was shock, Shock that this superpopular writer could have produced something like this,
I stumbled across The Lost Continent quite by accident, It was on my wifes personal bookshelf, which is to say, it was in a cardboard box under our bed, and I found it while looking for a shoe,
The premise a thirtyeight state tour of America, purportedly focusing on small towns seemed charming and sweet, a marvelous opportunity to hit the backroads and find beauty in simplicity.
Sure, thered probably be some light ribbing at the expense of rural folk, yet I was certain wed ultimately end at a place of warmth and conciliation,
Well, turns out my assumptions were wrong,
This book is garbage, I hated it, with every fiber of my being, From the first page to the last, This is awful. It is spiteful, mean, heartless, uninspired, offensive, insulting, unfunny, uninterested, and dreary,
At its best, it is punching down, At its worst, it is close to hateful,
The Lost Continent is a book to take your mood, whatever it is, and drive it down, like a nail pounded into soft mud by a sledgehammer.
In other words, not the best thing to be reading in, while America falls apart, In all honesty, this might have played a part in my reaction,
As noted above, Bryson has an incredibly lofty reputation, This was also his first book, so he was probably still working on his “voice, ” But these pages many of them filled with my furious annotations feel like the work of an antiintellectual knuckledragging mouthbreather,
The execution of The Lost Continent is cold, repetitive, and soulwearying, Bryson goes to a place, spends five minutes there, declares it “boring,” and leaves in a cloud of gutterlevel playground insults, He uses that descriptor boring so many times I stopped counting, Over and over again. It is the absolute height of obnoxiousness, My threeyearold says its boring, a lot, Bryson was thirtysix when he wrote this, I would never slap my kids, Bryson, on the other handnever mind,
The only joke that works in The Lost Continent is a meta one, To wit: Bryson, despite all his sneering at the nonpeople he meets, comes off as the dumbest asshole in the realm, He adds nothing to any conversation, He does not make a single acute observation, He is a lackluster fauxadventurer who finds only one thing in each new place: a reason to despise it, Mostly, his reasons contradict themselves, The waitresses are either too friendly or not friendly enough, The hotels are either too small or too large, The small towns are either too dumpy or too perfect, In the midst of this mess of illconsidered thoughts, Bryson somehow avoids putting two ideas together, even by accident, There is not a single insight about America worth repeating,
I love road trips, Like, really, really love them, When I first got married, my wife and I blazed a path thousands of miles long through Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, and Oklahoma, sniffing out historic sites and accumulating reststop maps and collecting gas station sunglasses and having the best time of our lives.
Every day we just woke up and drove, finding someplace new, Sometimes, when our four kids are simultaneously complaining about everything in a Brysonlike manner we think back to those days, when every road was an opportunity,
You almost cant go wrong with a road trip,
With Bryson as your seatmate, though, Id prefer ThirdClass tickets on the Titanic, His gimmick is aging frat boy, a tired mélange of casual misogyny, occasional fbombs, and an inability for selfreflection the constant fatshaming of women, for instance, is odd, since based on his cover photo, he's not exactly Brad Pitt from Thelma and Louise.
One has to question how, with the road before him, a map beside him, and all the time that he needed, Bryon went into this project with the mindset of a person on a death march.
I had fair warning, within the first few pages,
Things start off badly, and get worse, Bryson begins by claiming his birthright as a Midwesterner, Specifically, he is from Des Moines, Iowa, This opening gambit is a transparent pose, For some reason, people believe that claiming membership of a group gives them an openseason license to fire at will, Here, Bryson thinks he can be as “outrageous” as he wants, since hes ostensibly just another smalltowner, no different from the people hes slagging,
But thats not true, Bryson was born in Iowa, but hes lived the majority of his life in London, and he wastes no time establishing his superiority and Anglophilia,
You see that in the way he talks about Des Moines, a description that is just at odds with reality, Yes, Des Moines is in Iowa, No, despite Brysons allegations, it is not comprised solely of overweight women at the Merle Hay Mall, Rather, it is the state capital of Iowa with a cool capitol building, a college town Drake University, founded in, and host to a unique, internationallyknown event the Drake Relays.
It is a modern city, But to hear Bryson describe it, everyone is still going potty in an outhouse, while looking upwards in abject horror whenever a flying machine passes overhead,
Bryson is clearly a brainy guy, Yet, oddly, The Lost Continent presents very little by way of factoids or trivia, in contrast to One Summer, which was constructed entirely of factoids, Here, though, Bryson is absolutely uncurious and unquestioning, Take the Merle Hay Mall, Its not just a gathering place for the overweight, Its named for Merle Hay, reputed to be the first American soldier killed in World War I, Why do I know that Because I used to drive through Des Moines on a bimonthly basis, I saw the name, thought it was interesting, and I went home and looked it up, In all the thousands of miles that Bryson traveled, I dont think he once wrote something down and said, I should look that up, In short: He. Does. Not. Care.
The Lost Continent is roughly divided into two parts: East and West, In both, the setup is the same, Bryson who has been overseas for twenty years hops in his moms Chevette and starts driving, Its a simple, excellent idea, and it jumpstarted a long and lucrative career, in which he has morphed into a beloved literary figure,
Thats quite a turn, because The Lost Continent is mostly about Bryson badmouthing all that he surveys,
Unsurprisingly, Iowa gets slammed, Surprisingly, Bryson slams it by comparing it to the Sorrentine Coast, which is in Italy, and is also a place where the land meets the ocean, Is it really fair no, strike that, Is it really coherent to compare a landlocked state to an ocean coast No, its not, That doesnt matter to Bryson, because he has only three tools in his toolbox: Fat Women Jokes Corn Jokes and Euroelitism,
Thats not entirely accurate, He also finds time for some subSeinfeld riffs on the commercials he watches in his hotel room, You havent been introduced to NotFunny until youve seen Bryson crack wise about Preparation H, Honestly, youd be better off sniffing a ton of modeling glue, rather than exposing yourself to this,
The list of places that Bryson goes is long and merges together into one endless complaint, He doesnt like Hannibal, Missouri, or Mark Twains home, He doesnt like the Mississippi River “dull” or Gettysburg “boring” or the Smokey Mountains beautiful, but too many fat tourists, Because he wants to spread his unamusing misanthropy as far as possible, he even goes to big cities Las Vegas, New York City so he can complain about them too.
Nothing can possibly please him,
The incident that really stands out is when Bryson goes to Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the entire world, Of course, he concludes it is nothing but a massive disappointment, Why, you might ask Because it is busy that is, filled with tourists who are you guessed it! “fat”, and because he got lost,
Two quick points, The first: of course its busy, its Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world, Its not some dank chippy in Lambeth where you can just sit all day by yourself in a dark corner, sipping Carling and despising everything,
The second: Bryson getting lost is his own stinking fault, I went to Yosemite with friends some years ago, Since it was packed being one of the most beautiful, etc, etc. , we drove directly to the Ranger Station, and simply asked the Ranger where we could go to get away from the crowds, The Ranger answered our question, and we hiked for five days, With the exception of the day we went up Half Dome, we didnt see another soul, The point, of course, is that Yosemite is massive, You can get lost in it and not on the roads, like Bryson, but in the miles and miles and miles of backcountry paths, Bryson, though, goes to this place of incredible wonder and beauty, and is just disgusted, because there are others around him, Then he leaves and goes to a crappy hotel room to drink beer and watch television, like he does every night, If he had put forth the minutest effort, instead of whinging about every damn thing, he might have experienced something, Thats not his way, though, He prefers to take driveby potshots at the world which he clearly believes is meant for him alone, without ever getting out of his Chevette and interacting with his environment.
It is striking how few people Bryson actually speaks with in the course ofinterminable pages, Unlike Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic which is how you do a travelmemoir, Bryson cant engage in any meaningful interactions, This is not terribly shocking, since he comes off as a gaseous prick,
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning, as it is symptomatic of Brysons extremely dark view of humanity, To him, the people in these small towns are not people at all, They are creatures. They are lower lifeforms without thoughts, dreams, loves, interests, ambitions, The way he writes about them is almost a literary cleansing, a condescension so vast and powerful that it denies men and women their basic humanity, The funny thing is, the joke is on Bryson, Published in, we are now in the midst of a fullfledged culture war pitting urban Americans against rural Americans, The Lost Continent was not the cause, of course, But it was a harbinger, It turns out that a lot of Americans knew exactly what smug elites like Bryson were saying all along, It alienated them, and that alienation has turned to anger,
Somewhere along the line, Bryson must have changed, At the very least, his persona must have changed, Im making this assumption because I get Bryson recommendations all the time, Almost everyone I know has A Walk in the Woods on their shelves, This includes people who would not be okay with the way that Bryson talks about poverty and poor people including snide remarks to beggars about having “no dignity” or the way he refers to Truman Capote as “a mincing little fg.
”
Aside: Brysons views on poverty are both thoughtless, heartless, and factless, Indeed, there are times this feels like a highschool kid's unfortunate Twitter feed the kind you eventually erase, hoping no one saw it rather than the work of a middleage man who should know better.
I have not looked into the matter, but I wonder if Bryson realized that childhood and nostalgia would work better and sell more books than this toxic stew.
I wonder if he did the calculations and changed his style accordingly, If he did, only he can say if the change was more than skin deep,
To be fair though I shouldnt have to be fair Bryson isnt the final third of The Lost Continent is more palatable, This covers the time heading west, rather than east, and he lightens up a bit, acknowledges some of his own shortcomings, and also manages a glimmer ofwell, its not happiness, per se, but its a step above his usual griping.
The final page is beautifully written, and if the book had used that tone rather than being the exact opposite of that tone this might have been a great book, rather than one of the worst Ive ever encountered.
It also wouldve helped if there had been more of Brysons dad, a figure who appears far too infrequently, and seems a much better traveling companion, Brysons dad was excited to go places, excited to meet people, excited to be on the road,
The final thing I have to say I promise is that travel is an incredible privilege, Aside from being extremely fun, it is also among the finest ways that exist in our universe to make connections and create empathy across the lines national, cultural, racial, economic, religious that separate us.
It is an absolute shame that Bryson took this gift this gift of opportunity, of time, of ability to make his journey a parade of nastiness, In all his miles, he never found any common ground he found only chasms, In all his miles, he never shared an awesome sight he felt only bitterness that sights had to be shared, In all his miles, he never once seemed truly happy,
As a result, The Lost Continent is awfully sad, on top of everything else, .