The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

by Bill Bryson

Release Date: 12 September, 1990

Edition: Paperback

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Wicked humour

Bryson was born in Des Moines, and moved to England in his early twenties, marrying and settling down there. This book documents a trip by car around America, starting and ending in Des Moines, after many years in the UK. The ostensible theme of the book is a search for the perfect small town; a sort of Ray Bradbury idealization of fifties America. There's no such town, of course, but Bryson just uses the theme as a springboard for some of the funniest descriptions, stories, and digressions I have ever read.

When I started reading this book, I laughed so much my wife wouldn't let me read it in bed. Then she picked it up and discovered how funny it was, and wanted to read it before me. Eventually we compromised, and kept it in the car; the rule was that whoever was driving had to read it to the driver. Several times, however, the reader was laughing so hard that they couldn't get comprehensible words out, and the driver had to pull over to the hard shoulder and grab the book for themselves.

Yes, he's a curmudgeon, as other reviewers here have noticed. That's just his style. He's not deep, either; his occasional ruminations aren't negligible, but he's no Mark Twain. But he has an acidly sharp eye for inanity and stupidity, and his anecdotal technique is flawless.

His other travel books are along much the same lines, but to me this is the funniest, though "A Walk in the Woods" does show he is capable of good introspective writing. "The Lost Continent" is sharp, satirical, acute, and unkind--wickedly funny in every sense of the word.

Clever but cruel

Bryson's breakneck tour through small American towns (his running gag is that he's in search of an elusive perfect nostalgic town he calls "Amalgam") is terribly witty and occasionally dead-on in its lacerating descriptions of American tackiness and silliness. But often his insights are laced with the kind of acid you-can't-get-me cruelty that only an expatriate (Bryson lives in London) can pull off. His wonder at America's foolishness sometimes crosses right over the line to contempt, and that undercuts the truth in his descriptions. Beyond that, he has so much turf to cover (38 states), that he often doesn't do more than drive through a town and criticize the strip malls -- which are of course hideous -- or talk to anyone besides waitresses, motel clerks and cops, who are not always civilization's greatest ambassadors, in America or anywhere else. In a purely technical vein, his gleeful and often funny habit of inventing obviously untrue details forces a reader to wonder, after a while, how much of the more plausible description might also be false.

Bryson's a smart guy and a genuine wit. And it's a funny book. But his contemptuousness eats away at his power as a writer and as a guide to his own journey.