Straining for effect
Alexander Chancellor
NOTES FROM A BIG COUNTRY by Bill Bryson Doubleday, £16.99, pp. 318 Bill Bryson is a native of Des Moines, Iowa, who lived for many years in North Yorkshire with his English wife and four children before returning in 1996 to the United States and settling down in the little town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Before going home, he made a farewell journey around Britain which resulted in a best- selling book. Notes from a Small Island. This, three years later, is its American sequel, though it is in fact not really a book but a collection of 78 columns written over a period of 18 months for the Mail on Sunday's magazine, Night & Day. These columns are extremely readable, for Mr Bryson writes in an easy, breezy, blokey way, and he can at times be very funny. But he writes according to a formula which can also become a little wearying.
He offers a portrait of the American way of life through the eyes of an amiable, impractical, easy-going man who is mostly out of his depth in the modern world. He is bewildered by computers, tax forms and American bureaucracy in general, but soldiers on cheerfully through life with the support of a down-to-earth and under- standing spouse. This is the image of him- self he seeks to convey, and most of his 'A truly revolutionary breakthrough: a microscope shot of our organisation.' columns offer a pleasing combination of interesting facts dug up from press-cuttings and official statistics with his own everyday personal experience of living in New Hampshire. But a big problem with writing about America in this way is that it is virtu- ally impossible to avoid clichés.
For example, even people who have never been to the United States are famil- iar not only with the idea that Americans are very efficient and unbureaucratic peo- ple but also with the revisionist view that they are all tied up in red tape and not really efficient at all. Whatever you say about America therefore tends to sound familiar. While Mr Bryson comes up with some nice phrases, such as 'Americans have become so attached to the idea of convenience that they will put up with almost any inconvenience to achieve it' (for example electric carving knives, lighted revolving tie-racks and automatic curtains), he surprises us more often with his statis- tics than with his generalisations. It is interesting to learn that five per cent of all energy used in the United States is consumed by computers that have been left on all night, or that more than 400,000 Americans a year suffer injuries involving beds, mattresses or pillows, or that there are 200 million cars in the US (40 per cent of the world's total for about five per cent of its population) and exactly the same number of guns. More interesting still, given America's apparent obsession with immigration, is the fact that its population has one of the lowest proportions of immigrants in the developed world: just six per cent of the people in the US are foreign-born compared 'with, for instance, eight per cent in Britain and 11 per cent In France.
While many readers may not agree, I find it a pity that Mr Bryson relies so heavily for his comic effects on made-UP conversations and facts. For example, he begins one column as follows: 'I have a teenaged son who is a runner. He has, at a conservative estimate, 6,100 pairs of running shoes.' Well, that's obviously untrue, so what's the point of saying it? It would be much more interesting to lalow exactly how many pairs of running shoes the boy has. If he only had six, that would be quite impressive. And most of Mr Bryson's confrontations with bureaucrats, airport officials, restaurant greeters, and so on, involve conversations which he has obviously invented afterwards to amuse us. It might have been better if he had been less honest and made them sound at least plausible. The trouble with this habit of invention or exaggeration is that when Mr Bryson does offer us facts which are both interest- ing and true, he feels obliged to add comments like-1 am not making this up' or 'This is a true story.' This mars a mostly entertaining and stimulating look at Ameri- ca by a writer with a real eye for the curious and the absurd.
Previous page
