No place like home

Bill Bryson’s cheerful tour through the hallways and rooms of the history of the household leads to a cautionary tale for all

October 03, 2010|Buzzy Jackson, Globe Correspondent

All great writing is travel writing: The tale begins in one place, whether metaphorical or geographical, and ends somewhere unexpected. Despite its focus on domestic life, Bill Bryson’s newest book is no exception. What begins as a carefree jaunt through the rooms of a Victorian parsonage ends with a sobering message about the home of all mankind: Planet Earth.

Bryson has long been one of the English-speaking world’s favorite travel writers, but lately he’s largely stayed well off the open road. In “A Short History of Nearly Everything’’ (2003) Bryson hit the library and tackled science — a lot of it — from the origins of the universe to the evolution of human beings. In “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’’ (2006) he time-traveled back into memory to write an autobiography of his childhood. With his new book, there’s no need to go that far. “At Home’’ is ostensibly about his current house, a former rectory in Norfolk, England. “I formed the idea to make a journey around it, to wander from room to room and consider how each has featured in the evolution of private life. The bathroom would be a history of hygiene, the kitchen of cooking, the bedroom of sex and death and sleeping, and so on. I would write a history of the world without leaving home.”

It’s a pretty bold proposal. Writers have a hard enough time convincing the rest of the world that what they’re doing is work without Bryson claiming, “Here was a book I could do in carpet slippers.” Of course the result is much more than that. “At Home’’ is an exhaustive, at times exhausting, catalog of historical fun facts, from the explanation of why we keep salt and pepper on our dining tables to the reason British castles were surrounded by moats. “At Home’’ is replete with the characteristic Bryson wit and good cheer, and while the writing is always entertaining, the book’s narrative arc is occasionally obscured by the welter of individual stories Bryson relates. As he offers up yet another wacky historical figure (“Before becoming an architect Addison [Mizner] led a remarkably exotic life: he painted magic lantern slides in Samoa, sold coffin handles in Shanghai, peddled Asian antiquities to rich Americans, panned for gold in the Klondike”) or oddball factoid (“Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.”), the book begins to resemble a cabinet of Bryson’s personal curiosities. Yet our cheerful host does have at least one pet peeve: the seemingly unstoppable human tendency to discover, then exploit, and finally destroy whatever resource crosses its path.