The Lost Continent

...3 Cambridge Center...

...Very contemporary...

...The most familiar of these accounts is probably John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (1962), while perhaps the most popular recent example is William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways (1982...

...The Wall Street Journal "Encyclopedic in coverage, thoughtfully objective in presentation, and full of unexpected insights...

...Needless to say he doesn't find this town, but neither does he find much to get excited about...

...When, for instance, she identifies Those are pearls that were his eyes as "a line from 'The Waste Land,' " the effect is of a deliberate foreshortening of historical perspective...

...People in the West, says Bryson, walk with a lope and look "vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute...

...but Bryson can't be bothered with anything so mundane as actually talking to Americans...

...Outside his own capacity for drive-through comedy, virtually nothing...

...It doesn't really matter that a book with the sub-title "Travels in Small-Town America" includes among its small towns Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City...

...Or consider this bit of dialogue: PICTURING WILL Ann Beattie/Random House/230 pp...

...James Bowman is American correspondent of the Spectator of London...

...That provides as good a way as any to look at Picturing Will...

...But I suppose you can't, in the end, make too much of Bryson's superficialities and contradictions...

...Large photos could be pointed out on the bulletin board above the cash register if he didn't have her silver-framed image riding high above his forehead...

...The slang sense of "ball" is also appropriate when we get to Wayne, Will's randy daddy...

...Macon was nice," the author comments...

...Wayne is even more a leftover sixties person than the rest of the adult characters, even more than Miss Beattie herself...

...Crossing Missouri, he wonders if the license-plate nickname "The Show-Me State" might mean "Show Me the Way to Any Other State...

...It's clear that Bryson's exasperation is put on largely for easy laughs, and he does manage to be pretty funny about a lot of things...

...Colonial Williamsburg, for all its fakery, is "relentlessly attractive...

...Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent, the latest of these "on the road" books, is described on its dust jacket as the author's "sardonic account of his travels across thirty-eight states...

...Where, by the way, Tom Wolfe did his homework for The Bonfire of the Vanities...

...Bryson is an American writer who lives in London and seems to feel qualified for publishing his observations about America because he comes from Des Moines and took long car trips with his family when he was a child...

...It may be that, if you look hard enough, you can find both rhododendrons and maple trees in Florida, but to make a feature of them in a Florida landscape is like writing of the glaciers of the rain forest or the jungle of the Sahara...

...Similarly, Selma, Alabama, meets with his approval because it now appears that blacks and whites are getting along there...

...Of southeast Iowa he says: "Compared with an afternoon in a darkened room, it wasn't bad...

...dustry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other...

...If this seems a rather whimsical way in which to attempt serious comment upon what purports to be a serious book, it is appropriate when the book itself is as disjointed as Picturing Will...

...Some of the caps had buttons with funny sayings on them, and one—a gift from his daughter, which the customers sensed wasn't to be laughed at—had a small heart-shaped frame above the brim that contained a picture of Dalt's fat-cheeked granddaughter, Melanie Rae...

...But it is both a constant irritant and the means by which we are prevented from ever bringing the man quite into focus...

...K-Marts across the country are "always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme . . . the sort of people who would stay in to watch 'The Munsters.' " RV drivers are "strange and dangerous people and on no account should be approached...

...19.95 Donna Rifkind BLACKVVELL BOOKS IN THE NEWS A History of West Germany Volume LFrom Shadow to Substance, 1945-1963 Volume H:Democracy and its Discontents, 1963-1988 DENNIS L BARK & DAVID IL GRESS "A work of impressive scholarship, comprehensive scope, and narrative power, which will doubtless be the standard history in English for years to come...

...to see and a good deal that I didn't . . . I didn't get shot or mugged...

...If a ball is also a festive occasion, we may say that there is something of the celebratory about this part of the book: it is a frigid cotillion, a huddled ovation in honor of the way in which children manage to grow up both because of and in spite of the tutelary figures assigned to them by chance...

...The car didn't break down...

...As he explains it, every summer of his youth his father, "seized with a quietly maniacal urge to get out of the state and go on vacation," would load up the car and drag his family around the country...

...I was also taken in by Bryson's occa- sionall self-deprecating modesty...

...rr he cumulative effect of such stuff 1. is a state of more or less permanent dislocation, which is not altogether without interest...

...I wanted to see America...

...The journal that he keeps for Will puts in a couple of early appearances, set off by italics, but it is only at the end that we realize it is his...

...Otherwise, people are seen from a distance only, and usually with some degree of scorn: tourists in the Smoky Mountains are "always fat and dress like morons...

...I still had sixty-eight dollars and a clean pair of underpants...

...These snap judgments are in direct contradiction to Bryson's conviction that cars, suburbs, and "indiscriminate wealth" have "spoiled American life...

...Trips don't come much better than that...

...I wanted to come home...

...In the past, most "on the road" books have included their authors' discussions with characters in two-bit towns...

...This is the boy's stepfather, Mel...

...It should be read by anyone interested in the condition and the future of the Americas, but also by anyone concerned with the relation of religion and social change throughout the world" —Peter L. Berger, Institute for the Study of Economic Culture $29.95 cloth 368 pages Basil Blackwell, Inc...

...Very gracefully written—a pleasure to read....I hope those that forge policy will take it seriously...

...The answer is, not much...

...What exactly does Bryson see in America in the 1980s...

...Ann Beattie is sometimes spoken of as a "minimalist" author, and I confess that I am unable quite to make out what the word can mean in this context...

...After driving through all but ten of the lower forty-eight states, over a distance of 13,798 miles, Bryson proudly sums up: "I saw pretty much everything I wanted W hat Hugh Kenner calls "the Jane chord"—the first and last words of a book as a gnomic commentary on what goes on between them—is At/ball...

...It turns out that he cares more for Will, as a new human being in the world, than either of his natural parents does...

...Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books Volume I: $34.95 cloth 632 pages Volume II: $34.95 cloth 584 pages Persuasion and Soviet Politics DAVID WEDGWOOD BENN This book provides the background essential for understanding the complexity of Soviet politics and the emergence of the new era of glasnost...

...Then, at the end, all but one of them drop him, and the one who is left holding the ball is deemed the winner...

...Photography is Jody's occupation and as near as we get to an organizing leitmotif in the novel, so it is also dislocating to notice the author's poor eye for scene-snapping, her poor ear for dialogue...

...On the other hand, in the college town of Auburn, Bryson reflects that students' concerns today "seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice...

...The only people with whom he spends any time at all are his brother's family in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, a couple of journalist friends outside Philadelphia, another college friend in Iowa City, and a bemused niece in a small college in Santa Fe...

...Can this unearthly—or rather half-earthly—topography be deliberate...

...In the event of a serious economic contraction, there could be a populist backlash against the hotshots who have grown rich by leveraging America...

...There seems to be boundless enthu- siasm on the part of book publishers for bringing out accounts by people who have spent a lot of time driving around America...

...Ellen Mickiewicz, Former Chairperson, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies $27.95 cloth 256 pages Sandinistas The Party and the Revolution DENNIS GILBERT "The most balanced and best-informed account yet published of the Nicaraguan revolutionary process...

...Dalt was slightly cross-eyed...

...This kind of generalizing banality occurs often enough to be irritating...

...But compared with, say, the coast road along the Sorrentine peninsula, it was perhaps a little tame...

...When it comes to making shrewd generalizations," he admits at one point, "I am a cretin...

...It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada," according to Bryson, and South Dakota is "the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber...

...Now in his mid-thirties, Bryson himself "became gripped with a curious urge to go back to the land of my youth and make what the blurb writers like to call a journey of discovery...

...Perhaps Dalt is there as an authorial self-portrait...

...Bryson so much as confesses that he thinks all rich, pretty towns in America are good, while all poor towns are beyond redemption...

...Natural enough, for such a dealer in fragments as Ann Beattie...

...I wanted to travel around...

...His narrative is engineered to include a maximum number of jokes, and I laughed at many of the most sophomoric ones, like this comment about the Pennsylvania Dutch in Lancaster County: "The Mennonites are named after a well-known brand of speed-stick deodorant...

...Nor do they explain why, when he sees an expensive car driven by a blonde coed, he offers this sentiment: "If I could have run fast enough to keep up, I would happily have urinated all down the side of it...

...Can'ridge MA 02142 At your bookstore, or toil-free: (800) 443-6638 (NInsterCarcti lisa only) 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 the first thing he sees there is "an obviously well-educated black man in a three-piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal...

...On the contrary, she seems to me if anything maximalist in the way she piles up meaningless and unnecessary details: The fan above the cash register was blowing...

...I wanted to see lightning bugs [Bryson continuesi, and hear 'cicadas shrill, and be inescapably immersed in that hot, crazy-making August weather that makes your underwear scoot up every crack and fissure and cling to you like latex, and drives mild-mannered men to pull out handguns in bars and light up the night with gunfire...

...Bryson is prone to making the most outrageously superficial observations with no trace of irony or facetiousness...

...For some reason, after his introduction he is referred to by everybody throughout the rest of the book as "Haveabud...

...Milton Friedman, The Hoover Institution $39.95 cloth 320 pages Tongues of Fire The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America DAVID MARTIN One of the world's leading authorities on the sociology of religion examines the phenomenal spread of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and its cultural and political ramifications...

...Customers found out the child's name even if they drank at the bar only one time...

...The ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, is "most agreeable," while Wells, Nevada, where "almost everything in town appeared to exist on the edge of dereliction," is "the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I've ever seen...

...Or consider her character D. B. Haverford...

...But other things about The Lost Continent were less admirable...

...Someday, when the yuppie has gone the way of the flapper, books like Liar's Poker will be read with the same incredulity as memoirs from the court of Louis XIV...

...It was Michael Lewis's good luck to arrive at Salomon at the peak of its power and prosperity and observe the professional apoplexy in what was for a while probably the most exciting room in America—the trading floor on the 41st floor at One New York Plaza...

...Neither these late twentieth-century characters nor their creator can see as far back as Shakespeare, whose words here are only known as one of the "fragments" Eliot shored against his ruin...

...The West is a land of drifters, all looking to make fortunes as movie stars or rock stars or game-show contestants...

...Is this a feeble joke—Havea-Ford/Have-a-Bud—that she just never got tired of...

...But he also asks what many politicians are going to wonder aloud if the economy ever gets into serious trouble: What exactly does all this high-velocity spinning of money by a handful of MBAs do for the rest of the economy...

...Little that makes his heart leap for joy...

...I wanted to look for NeHi Pop and Burma Shave signs...

...But just as one does not begrudge the misbehavior of aristocrats in seventeenth-century France simply because it is so entertaining to read about, it is hard not to be amused at the late twentieth-century equivalent—the 26-yearold bond trader with no family, no mortgage, no responsibilities, just a job which gushes cash...

...He is searching, as he admits, for the perfect small town, "a place of harmony and inDonna Rifkind is a writer living in New York City...

...Abraham Lowenthal, Foreign Affairs $13.95 paper $27.95 cloth 234 pages The Economic Consequences of Immigration JULIAN L. SIMON "(Simon) explodes virtually every popular dogma of the seal-the-borders brigade....he has been a lonely voice against a chorus of Malthusian population planners, development specialists and neo-Know Nothings...

...I wasn't once approached by a Jehovah's Witness...

...Jody, Will's mother, is in the habit of stuffing little bits of the detritus of her life—cash register receipts, children's drawings, junk mail, candy wrappers —into an envelope and mailing them to her ex-husband without comment, and it is not long before the reader is beginning to feel like poor Wayne—bombarded with triviality...

...I don't think learning comes into it very much...

...But what has Bryson managed to discover in America...

...At Salomon, the more money you made, the greater the license for adolescent behavior...

...Maybe...

...And for that reason I liked it...

...He appears to go out of his way to avoid talking to anyone, except for a few laconic interchanges, when necessary, with waitresses and gas-station attendants...

...The journey itself lends these books an unvarying linear structure and a uniformity of tone: there's a leisurely, rambling feel for time and space, with plenty of room for lyrical passages and a touch of melancholy here and there, when the writer gets nostalgic for the way he imagines America used to be...

...As this is the only appearance of both Dalt and Melanie Rae in the novel, Miss Beattie's readers must feel rather like Dalt's customers: admitted to an unsought intimacy for no apparent reason...

...As Lewiscorrectly points out, if social contribution is the measure, the new breed of Wall Street trader would be billed rather than paid at the end of the year...

...But most likely, the markets will finally impose their own discipline—traders will run out of hedges, the ziggurats of debt will begin to shake, and there will be a reckoning...

...And "balling" was something that sixties people did more out of a sense of self-affirmation than eroticism—something almost shockingly joyless and sterile...

...He finds Columbus, Mississippi, a "deeply pleasing and encouraging place," for instance, because THE LOST CONTINENT: TRAVELS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA Bill Bryson/Harper & Row/314 pp...

...Architecturally the novel is quite tightly constructed, but it is an architecture of cotton candy: at the textural level it seems to have almost no substance...

...Lewis's portrait-painting is hysterically funny, from the pizza-eating troglodytes at the mortgage desk to the trader who throws ten dollars at a colleague heading for the airport and asks him to buy some crash insurance because, "I just feel lucky...

...18.95 James Bowman THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 45...

...What counts, for Bryson, is that he be entertaining at all costs—and, for the most part, he is...

...He was wearing one of his many baseball caps studded with fishing lures...

...Will, both novel and character, is the product of such people, and it/he never quite recovers from the fact...

...In fact, the primary emotion he exhibits is boredom...

...all the towns in the South seemed to be nice...

...On one level the novel is, for most of its length, a particularly dreary and pointless ball game in which the title character, a fiveyear-old boy, is bounced back and forth between various parents and surrogate parents- to no very obvious purpose...

...and if things don't work out they can always become a serial murderer...

...This is a book of very great importance...

...The America Bryson shows us is a curiously unpopulated one...