Bill Bryson

I've just started The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's first book. I've read it before, a long time ago, but had it to hand. I needed to read something light and frothy after the marathon that was The Tenderness of Wolves, and Bryson's books are perfect for filling in those gaps when you're not in the mood for anything demanding. The last one I read was Neither Here Nor There, but the previous two were A Walk in the Woods and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, his most recent book. Some of them are mine, but others are borrowed - my children and my brother have several, so I never need to buy them.
I have to confess to a very slight ambivalence about him - he's my generation, and I always feel a bit funny about people my age. I wonder what their experiences of for example, the fifties and the sixties, were, and compare their subsequent lives to mine. I suppose there's a special intimacy which is absent from people from a different generation. I expect it's like this for everyone - people from the war generation will feel that particularly intensely. I suppose what reading Bryson means, for me, is that his experiences of school, college, growing up, etc all took place at roughly the same time as mine, even though his life in Des Moines was very different to mine. But not that different. Because growing up in the West in the Sixties and Seventies took place in the thick of a cultural revolution - the impact of which we are still experiencing. And our parents grew up in World War II, something which had a profound effect on our lives. We rejected their experiences, and we had to rediscover them.
Bryson's books are permeated with his childhood, and the lives of his parents and grandparents, and this has made them fascinating and compulsive for my generation, and I have to say, for succeeding generations. My children have his books, and enjoy them. I think it's their irreverence, their cynicism, yet open-hearted, wide-eyed innocence that appeals - who knows? Whatever it is, he's made a fortune, and good luck to him. He's made a pretty a decent career out of his travels and observation - it's not everyone who can construct a genial personality and make a living out of it. If that sounds a bit snarky, it's because reading his earlier books, I've come across stuff he's recycled in later books. Other writers have committed worse crimes, and Bryson only plagiarises himself - in that sense, he's a true original.
Anyway, I enjoy his freeform, improvisatory style - there's a school essay feel about them, especially the earlier books, a kind of school essay, 'what I did on my holidays' feel. He goes into places with a blank canvas and takes them as they come, but he's quite open about his prejudices. If he doesn't like a place at first sight, it's difficult for him to change his mind, but he often finds something to enjoy, even if it's only sitting in a motel room with a six-pack and a TV.
One of his main characteristics, which occurs in all his books, is his habit of making things up - I can see why he does it, it's a bit of exaggeration, a way of adding colour. Sometimes I find it a bit tiresome, but not always - sometimes it's funny. It's another thing he just does, and I suppose his books wouldn't be the same without it. He's everyman, really, but of course, he isn't any more - he's a best-selling writer, and famous.
He's a youngest child of three, and that's very obvious. There's something a bit attention-seeking about him. He wants to be heard, and noticed and feels a bit hard-dome-by if he's ignored. Often youngest children are good at playing the fool, as they often have trouble making themselves heard, or getting people to notice them. So you always get the feeling he's basking in his celebrity, and loves the attention - and who can blame him.
When he recently became President, I think it was, of the CPRE, he was all over the radio airwaves, thoroughly enjoying himself, so I hope he's hard at work. He's now an adopted Englishmen, with an English wife and children, and as is often case, more English than the English, a strange journey for someone from Des Moines, but that's the 20th century for you.