Let's eat Grandpa!

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

Source: Personal copy
Finished: 2/1/12
Rating: 7 out of 10
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 320
Published: 1989
Challenges: 2012 TBR Pile Reading Challenge

Synopsis (from the AudioFile): Iowa native Bryson returns from several years of residence in the U.K. and takes a long driving trip in the U.S. to see what he’s been missing. Not much apparently; he turns his rapier wit on everything and everyone he runs across. He reads billboards! He describes tacky towns! He treats us to tales of family trips with his parsimonious father! He voices glum room clerks and grumpy gas station attendants! An all-you-can-eat adventure in Amish country is a comic vignette in itself.

Overall Impression: Bryson wrote this toward the beginning of his wonderful writing career, and because of that, it comes across as dated. I think anything written in 1989 is going to feel that way (*cough*The Stand*cough*).

But thankfully, it doesn’t detract too much from Bryson’s writing. One of the things I love about his travelogues is that he just…goes. And sees what he can see. He doesn’t try and hit all the hot spots — he just meanders through small town America, musing upon the strangeness of the cities that we don’t normally come across as tourists. Although Bryson is a native of Iowa, he had spent the prior 20 years before his trip in the UK, so he had the interesting point of view of being both a local and a foreigner. Sometimes he feels like he fits right in, and other times he might as well be from Mars. Problem is, small town America is small town America no matter where you go, so his journey got a little repetitive after a while.

Usually Bryson’s travelogues make me want to go places, but this one really didn’t have me aching to to anywhere, except maybe Mackinac Island in Michigan. I think it’s because I don’t necessarily have any desire to see a lot of small town America, especially now that it’s mostly strip malls and fast food restaurants. I live in the suburbs. I know what it is like. But I did enjoy his reminisces of his travels with his family when he was a kid, though to get the full joy of reading about Bryson’s childhood, I highly recommend The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

As he was traveling through the Great Smoky Mountains, Bryson made this observation:

“At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America — a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.”

I couldn’t agree more. I loved New Zealand, for example, because so much of it was nature and so much was livable space and half the time you couldn’t tell the difference between the two. While I am thankful to live where I live, sometimes I really just want to live among more nature, more beauty, more wildness. Then again, I also want hip restaurants, good shopping, and an occasional sporting event. So…perhaps the living in the suburbs about two hours away from Lake Tahoe is just about as good as I’m going to get.

Positives: Bryson is very dry and very funny. He is a great observationalist (yes I just made that word up, but it’s very apropos).

Negatives: Being more than 20 years old, the book was dated. It would be interesting for him to retrace his steps now to see what he sees in 2012.

Other books I’ve read by Bill Bryson: 

At Home (review)
Icons of England (review)
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country (review)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
The Mother Tongue
Neither Here Nor There (review)
Notes from a Small Island
Shakespeare: The World As Stage (review)
A Walk in the Woods

Other blogger opinions:

Sophisticated Dorkiness: “A major issue I had throughout was inconsistency. Bryson would come across a diner or a tourist trap in one place and simply hate it. He’d rip it apart in a way that was funny but at the same time, just a little mean. Then just a few pages later he’d hit something else that sounded exactly the same, but instead he’d love it.”

Here, There and Everywhere: “ What a shame that each and every one of us never really gets to see our very own country.  But if you’d like… this book could give you at least a tiny view.

Avid Reader’s Musings: “Don’t get me wrong, there are some funny bits, but it’s no where near his normal level of hilarity.”