Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Julie A. Sellers, author of the novel Ann of Sunflower Lane. Welcome to this High Plains Public Radio Readers BookByte of The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson.
This piece of travel literature comes to us from the late 1980s as Bryson sets off to find glimpses of the past following his father’s death. Bryson travels from his home in England to his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. He is overcome by a sense of nostalgia and yearning for the past, and specifically, the family vacations his father planned and executed. Bryson leaves from Des Moines in a borrowed Chevy Chevette, traveling first East and then West in search of the past and of what he imagines as the quintessential American small town. Bryson describes this ideal small town as “an amalgam of all those towns I had encountered in fiction. Indeed, that might well be tis name—Amalgam, Ohio, or Amalgam, North Dakota. It could exist almost anywhere, but it had to exist. And on this trip, I intended to find it.”
Bryson’s motives for his trip speak of farsickness, or fernweh, a German term describing an intense longing for faraway places. We can feel the intense longing of farsickness whether we’ve ever traveled to a place and even if the place itself isn’t real. Bryson’s search for the lost landscapes of his childhood family vacations and for Amalgam, USA, reflects that sense of longing for somewhere distant and perhaps even intangible. Given this lens, it is not surprising that some of the unexpected that he finds falls short of his expectations. Anyone who has felt that urge to travel and explore can connect with the anticipation of discovery and the frustration when what we dreamed of isn’t what we find.
Bryson’s reminiscences of his family vacations mix his unique humor with nostalgia. His memories offer points of commonality with readers’ whose parents planned similar trips. Bryson remembers stopping at any and all historical markers as a child and finding them dull. He also remembers the dangers of having an extroverted father stop to ask for directions, only to disappear into a prolonged conversation. Bryson portrays everything from shenanigans in the back seat on these trips to disappointing tourist attractions as a motive for humor.
Some of Bryson’s humor is acerbic, and at times, cutting. He often seems to criticize people and places more than he finds joy in meeting or visiting them. Given Bryson’s goal of finding the perfect small American town, one wonders if his dissatisfaction is a result of the collision between his farsick dreams and the reality he finds.
Published in 1989, Bryson’s book might well produce a new layer of farsick longing for distant places and times among new generations of readers who wonder how he made such a trip across the country without a smart phone or GPS.
I’m Julie A. Sellers for HPPR Radio Reader’s Book Club.