Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America Book

"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 can't 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, internationally-bestselling author. I know his books are on the shelves of millions. Heck, even I own one, the entertaining, easily-digestible 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 super-popular writer could have produced something like this.

I stumbled across The Lost Continent quite by accident. It was on my wife's 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 thirty-eight 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, there'd probably be some light ribbing at the expense of rural folk, yet I was certain we'd 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 2020, 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 anti-intellectual knuckle-dragging mouth-breather.

The execution of The Lost Continent is cold, repetitive, and soul-wearying. Bryson goes to a place, spends five minutes there, declares it "boring," and leaves in a cloud of gutter-level 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 three-year-old says it's boring, a lot. Bryson was thirty-six when he wrote this. I would never slap my kids. Bryson, on the other hand…never mind.

The only joke that works in The Lost Continent is a meta one. To wit: Bryson, despite all his sneering at the non-people 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 faux-adventurer 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 ill-considered 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 rest-stop 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 Bryson-like manner - we think back to those days, when every road was an opportunity.

You almost can't go wrong with a road trip.

With Bryson as your seatmate, though, I'd prefer Third-Class tickets on the Titanic. His gimmick is aging frat boy, a tired mélange of casual misogyny, occasional f-bombs, and an inability for self-reflection (the constant fat-shaming 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 open-season license to fire at will. Here, Bryson thinks he can be as "outrageous" as he wants, since he's ostensibly just another small-towner, no different from the people he's slagging.

But that's not true. Bryson was born in Iowa, but he's 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 Bryson's 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 1881), and host to a unique, internationally-known 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 un-curious and unquestioning. Take the Merle Hay Mall. It's not just a gathering place for the overweight. It's 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 don't 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 mom's Chevette and starts driving. It's a simple, excellent idea, and it jumpstarted a long and lucrative career, in which he has morphed into a beloved literary figure.

That's 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, it's not. That doesn't matter to Bryson, because he has only three tools in his toolbox: Fat Women Jokes; Corn Jokes; and Euro-elitism.

That's not entirely accurate. He also finds time for some sub-Seinfeld riffs on the commercials he watches in his hotel room. You haven't been introduced to Not-Funny until you've seen Bryson crack wise about Preparation H. Honestly, you'd 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 doesn't like Hannibal, Missouri, or Mark Twain's home. He doesn't 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 complaint 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 it's busy, it's Yosemite National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's 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 didn't 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. That's not his way, though. He prefers to take drive-by 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 of 299 interminable pages. Unlike Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic (which is how you do a travel-memoir), Bryson can't 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 Bryson's 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 1989, we are now in the midst of a full-fledged 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. I'm 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 f-g."

(Aside: Bryson's views on poverty are both thoughtless, heartless, and fact-less. Indeed, there are times this feels like a high-school kid's unfortunate Twitter feed - the kind you eventually erase, hoping no one saw it - rather than the work of a middle-age 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 shouldn't have to be fair; Bryson isn't - 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 of…well, it's not happiness, per se, but it's 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 I've ever encountered. It also would've helped if there had been more of Bryson's dad, a figure who appears far too infrequently, and seems a much better traveling companion. Bryson's 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.