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Literary
Open House
By
B.A. Nilsson
At
Home: A Short History of Private Life
By
Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 498 pages, $28.95
I knew that falling down your own stairs at some point is
nearly inevitable. I knew that it can be lethal, especially
to oldsters. I didn’t know that you can blame the staircase
for it. Thanks to Bill Bryson’s relentless exploration of
his living space—an old rectory in eastern England—I’ve learned
that “unmarried people are more likely to fall than married
people, and previously married people fall more than most
of those.”
As for the stairs themselves: “Poor lighting, absence of handrails,
confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually
high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and
landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are
the principal design faults that lead to accidents.”
Having chronicled such activities as a trek along the Appalachian
Trail and a trek across Australia, not to mention giving us
A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling
Bryson had turned his engaging voice and penchant for obsessive
research to the taken-for-granted aspects of life at home.
Specifically, his home, which means that we’re treated to
the particulars of a time and place unique to Bryson’s life
but offering resonance for anyone who’s ever wondered how
the rituals and appurtenances of life at home developed.
“Nothing
about this house—or any house—is inevitable. Everything had
to be thought of—doors, windows, chimneys, stairs—and a good
deal of that . . . took far more time and experimentation
than you might ever have thought.”
Bryson’s strategy and skill is an ability to awaken a curiosity
about what you might have taken for granted, then satisfy
that curiosity, provided you can hang on through what’s usually
a wide-ranging, discursive narrative tour from room to room.
If the book has a fault, it’s a tendency to wander so far
afield that you wonder where the hell the house went. His
chapter on the nursery, for example, begins logically enough
with a colorful history of childbirth but soon veers into
a sociological study of England’s poor, with mention of Malthus,
Marx and Engels. Yet, by the end of the chapter’s 23 pages,
not only does he bring the subject back to how the kids of
poverty dwelled, but also takes a look at the accommodation
of children of privilege, noting, for example, the practice
of one Victorian father who “had eleven children but set out
breakfast for only ten, to discourage slowness in arriving
at the table.”
Starting in the hall (“No room has fallen further in history”),
the journey winds us through kitchen, larder, cellar, study,
garden (British for “yard”), bedroom, dressing room and more,
with a stop at the fuse box that expands into a history of
artificial light, dispelling the received notion that, during
pre-electric days, people went to bed when it got dark. (“There
certainly seems to have been no rush to bring the day to a
close.”)
Although I was expecting to learn much about such old-house
characteristics as plaster and lathe and knob-and-tube wiring—two
of the banes of my own old-house ownership—the narrative tends
to use each room as a jumping-off place for a macro view of
social domestication. Thus, the chapter on the drawing room
explodes into a look at some ambitious architects who designed
cathedral-like mansions with varying degrees of success.
And the bathroom—ah, the bathroom!—gets 30 pages, making it
one of the longest chapters, but what room is more transformative?
From a history of the word “toilet” to disquisitions on hygiene
(“Christianity was always curiously ill at ease with cleanliness
. . . and early on developed an odd tradition of equating
holiness with dirtiness”), we get the background not only
on the room’s appliances but also a history of the processing
of sewage itself, with an admirably restrained level of cheap
scatological humor.
As his many fans know and expect, Bryson’s narrative voice
is laced with humor, his writing style is accessible, and
his passion for detail seems inexhaustible. This is a dense
tome, tempting to consume in a concentrated burst, but suitable
also for reading on the . . . but there’s no metaphorical
need to go there.
The American author has an English wife, and the family has
bounced back and forth across the Atlantic at various times.
This is reflected in Bryson’s book subjects, which include
Notes From a Small Island, a collection of essays about
(and first published in) Great Britain; Made in America,
ditto here, and The Lost Continent, ditto Europe. Like
any conscientious writer, he’s also fascinated with the tools
of his trade and has covered that subject in Bryson’s Dictionary
for Writers and Editors and The Mother Tongue,
much-needed beacons for a world in which even The New Yorker
routinely fails to find the correct agreement between
subject and verb. Not surprisingly, this book is educational
on many levels; how nice that there’s also so much enjoyment
mixed in.
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