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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2015Bill Bryson is probably best known for his travel memoirs, but before "A Walk in the Woods," the only one of his books I'd read was "The Mother Tongue," a delightfully rambling exploration of the English language. I've since read reviews in which people who seem to know what they're talking about claim that "The Mother Tongue" is more entertaining than it is accurate, but of course, language is an eternally complex and controversial subject. I enjoyed Bryson's wit and style, and I figured he probably couldn't go wrong narrating an adventure of his own rather than trying to convey to the reader the complexity of Finnish verb conjugations. After the juicy trainwreck that was Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," I was in the mood for a hiking memoir without the melodrama and psychobabble, something down-to-earth and smart and at least as much about the actual trail as about the author's metaphorical "journey." The deliciously understated title of Bryson's account of his 1996 attempt to tackle the Appalachian Trail promised exactly what I was looking for.
Oh, "A Walk in the Woods" could have been good. It could have been SO GOOD. For the most part, it actually was. The first couple of chapters had me almost shivering with delight at Bryson's curmudgeonly humor and self-deprecating wit, and once, I even laughed out loud. Bryson is the kind of unpretentious, straightforwardly spot-on prose stylist that makes good writing look terrifically easy. Throughout the book, he balances action and description, narrative momentum and entertaining diversions, with a masterful hand. Whatever subject Bryson takes up, be it continental drift or bear attacks or early American amateur botanists or a Pennsylvania coal fire that's burned for over thirty years (over fifty, as of the writing of this review) or the history of the trail itself, becomes instantly and effortlessly fascinating.
What almost ruined "A Walk in the Woods" for me, however, was almost every scene in which Bill Bryson interacts with other human beings. The traveling companion with whom Bryson shares most of his walk, Stephen Katz (a somewhat fictionalized version of his friend Matthew Angerer), is portrayed unflatteringly but ultimately with affection, and the book is dedicated to him. (Angerer has admitted in interviews that he's not thrilled about how Bryson portrays him, but it's a pretty accurate portrayal aside from a few fabricated or exaggerated incidents.) Almost everyone else Bryson meets on the trail, however, becomes an object of mockery. The gentle good humor of the first few chapters quickly turns nasty. It was funny when Bryson listed "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex" along with "rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; . . . rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm" in a catalogue of the trail's potential perils, but it stopped being funny when I realized he actually meant it: Bryson honestly expects the Appalachian woods to be full of violent, inbred stereotypes incarnate.
Look, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon myself. I *love* laughing at human stupidity. Nobody laughs louder than I do when Bill Engvall does his "Here's Your Sign" routine. However, Bryson's need to sneer at the intellectual poverty of nearly everyone he meets says more about him than it does about any of them. Towards the end of the book, he asks a fellow hiker he meets at a guesthouse a question he has to admit is "a trifle" inane, the sort of thing he's spent 250 pages mocking other people for saying, and then he has the gall to describe the manner of her answer as "serenely mindless." (When she and her traveling companion pray over their meal and credit God with helping them keep a positive attitude despite the rigors of the trail, Bryson "made a mental note to lock my door when I went to bed.") The first time Bryson decides to skip a portion of the trail, it's because the citizens of Tennessee are too stupid for his liking. (Even if Tennesseans were as cretinous as Bryson makes them out to be, it's unclear why that should matter when he's spending most of his time in the state *alone in the woods*.) If there's anything Bryson dislikes even more than stupid people, it's fat people. He himself admits at the beginning of the book to being somewhat less than svelte after "years of waddlesome sloth," and at the end that his exertions on the trail left him "slender and fit" for "a brief, proud period," which is implied to be long over. Other fat people, however, including his friend Katz, are just plain ridiculous and disgusting. Bryson professes admiration for a 350-pound man who thru-hiked the trail (which Bryson himself never even seriously attempted), but clearly doesn't admire him enough to refrain from calling him a "human beachball," or dismissing the 53 pounds the man lost as "a trifle, all things considered." Fat women, or any other female who doesn't meet Bryson's standard of attractiveness, who dare to express sexual interest in a man are simply beneath contempt. In perhaps the single meanest anecdote in a book liberally peppered with meanness, Bryson introduces us to "a charmless, gum-popping waitress who declined to be heartened by our wholesome smiles . . . let's call her Betty Slutz." Actually, there's no need to call her anything, since she's never mentioned again after this page - and the misogyny of the insult is purely gratuitous, since her behavior as Bryson describes it is surly, not sexually provocative.
Bryson's apparent delight in fault-finding carries over to the trail itself, although with less petty meanness. Anyone who heads out into the wilderness with a backpack has earned the right to grumble-brag a bit about aches and privations, but Bryson doesn't actually seem to enjoy the hike or really understand why he's doing it, except that he got the notion into his head and can't back out now (why do I get the feeling the fancy camping gear he buys was paid for with a publisher's advance?). He wishes the trail were a bit less wild, less wooded, more in contact with at least the fringes of civilization, even though he's profoundly unimpressed with nearly all of the towns it does pass through. (Most hikers, after several days or weeks in the woods, are nearly ecstatic for a chance to take a shower, eat a hot meal or two, sleep for a night in a proper bed, and listen awhile to the hum of human conversation before heading back out on the trail, but not Bryson: he wants cul-chah and refinement, or something.) He raises some valid criticisms of the National Park Service, but doesn't give them any credit for the things they actually have accomplished. Perhaps most damning, Bryson rails against acid rain and accidentally-imported tree diseases, but he treats Katz's littering, which he actually had the power to do something about, as a big joke.
Perhaps I'm doing a bit of a Bryson myself here, pointing out all the flaws of something I basically enjoyed. If I can't recommend "A Walk in the Woods" wholeheartedly, well, neither do I mean to say you *shouldn't* read it. Most of this book is a pleasure to read, both entertaining and informative, and often very funny. If you're considering a thru-hike (or even a substantial section-hike) of the Appalachian Trail, you'll want to read some accounts by those who have actually hiked the whole way, or made a serious attempt to do so. (Bryson hikes only about two-fifths of the trail; that's no mean accomplishment, especially since more than half that distance he was backpacking hardcore in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, but he skipped or day-hiked nearly everything above the Mason-Dixon line - ironic, considering his utter disdain for the South.) For the armchair traveler, however, it's excellent fun and a journey well worth taking. I wish only that Bill Bryson had been better company along the way.
