Chuck Thompson’s To Hellholes and Back
February 5th, 2010 Posted in Travel books, Travel funnies
I’m currently buried in writing a book about travel writing in the digital age. As I scan existing books about how to be a travel writer, I realize just how much advice out there is hopelessly out-of-date and downright wrong. But Chuck Thompson’s great book Smile When You’re Lying follows the “show don’t tell” route instead. It entertains you while it skewers everything (and I do mean everything) having to do with the travel industry. It’s great fun.
Thankfully To Hellholes and Back is no sophomore slump. It’s the Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, or Nirvana second album, not the #2 from De La Soul or the Strokes. Really though this book is the literary equivalent of Motorhead. It comes out firing fast and furious and never slows down. Try reading this section out loud in one breath:
“And no, it doesn’t make me un-American to have assiduously avoided setting foot in a fabricated dream patch plopped in the middle of a morally rudderless state of bogus elections with a half-baked citizenry who think absolutely nothing of supporting an idiotic fifty-year embargo of Cuba or taking the Camaro with the slave-days flag decals to the corner market for a pack of smokes without bothering to put their shirts on.
So, Disney.”
The book’s angle is that the author is going to visit four destinations he has always avoided: Africa (the Congo), India, Mexico City, and Disney World. For different reasons, these are his hellholes.
All four places are ripe for hilarious observations and cynicism, from the constant bribery and dysfunction in the Congo to the incessant scamming and aggressive selling in India. He captures these two places amazingly well and keeps you entertained the whole time. The latter two hellholes turn out to be, well, pretty nice actually. Some may accuse him of going soft in the second half because of this, especially on Disney. But as a dad I have to agree with him: you can’t help but be impressed by the well-oiled Disney machinery when you visit their parks and as hard as it is to admit, Hannah Montana is actually a better sitcom than most of what’s on the networks during prime time. And as I’ve noted here before, Mexico City is ten times nicer than most people think. (Like me, Thompson gained a belt notch size eating his way around the city.)
Thompson was once an editor at Maxim and what he learned there definitely shapes his writing. Every paragraph has a joke in it and the metaphor per inch ratio is the highest I can ever recall seeing anywhere outside the lad magazine world. If you don’t like pop culture references and the phrase “like a…” appearing nonstop in your travelogues, this is not the book for you.
By the end of the book I was exhausted. But in a good way. Since I’m throwing out musical references, Thompson is the travel writing equivalent of Joe Satriani or John Coltrane. The virtuosity can leave your mouth hanging open, but don’t expect your girlfriend to get it.
Having said that, it all works. I’ve read many painful attempts at this always-on style that fall flat because the writer is not really all that funny. It feels forced. Thompson is a true craftsman, putting serious effort into every sentence on the page and refusing to make anything a throwaway line. Sustaining that for 300 pages is an incredible feat and it shows just how gifted and humorous he really is to keep you reading until the end. This is, without a doubt, the most entertaining travel book I’ve read since The Geography of Bliss and oddly enough, I probably learned as much from this one too.
You can get it at Amazon or get To hellholes and back from Barnes & Noble.
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