I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson
290 pages
Published 1999
Read from June 5 to June 6
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Humor
columns are far from my favorite kind of writing. When I was a kid I
used to read Dave Barry, but you can hardly blame me -- I was just a
kid. I never imagined I'd put Bill Bryson into the same category as Dave
Barry, but I guess there's just something about a weekly newspaper
column that invites lazy jokes about governmental inefficiency and the
inanity of summer blockbusters. And don't get me started on why stores
only ever have one open checkout lane, am I right? Reading an entire book
of three- or four-page humorous essays with lazy punchlines composed
under inflexible deadlines has a dulling effect. Individual essays might
well be hilarious in the best Bryson tradition, but cumulatively they
get less and less funny. In the early going, especially, Bryson got in a
rut where every essay opened with a non-sequitir observation, jumped to
a seemingly unrelated topic, and then brought back the original
non-sequitir as the punchline. A dozen essays in a row followed this
exact structure. His compositions became looser and more natural as his
column matured, but then he began incorporating serious political
polemics about immigration and corporations spying on workers and
whatnot. I may have shared his opinions on some topics, disagreed with
him on others, but I'm not reading Bill Bryson to get his opinions on
late 1990s social issues. I read him either for what he has to say on
subjects that interest me (the history of science, the English language,
the Appalachian Trail) or for funny. Those draws were often sadly
lacking here.
In his books qua books, Bryson has a way of
examining serious topics at length without detracting from the more
lighthearted sections, one of the many benefits of compositional freedom
and not adhering to length requirements. If he had written I'm a Stranger Here Myself
as an actual book, he could devote a thirty page chapter to his
assessment of the military-industrial complex or the evolution of the
tax system, and I'm certain it would be interesting, regardless of
whether I agreed with him on it or not. Certainly he wouldn't need to
resort to lazy, Dave Barry-esque observations. A weekly column just
doesn't seem to be a good fit for Bryson's style, or at least what I
like about Bryson's style. Which makes I'm a Stranger Here the first Bryson book I wasn't crazy about.
No comments:
Post a Comment