A review by erica_lynn_huberty
The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall
2.0
While I admit I did laugh out loud many times while reading The Anglo Files, I found it an incomplete and distorted examination of British life, culture, and people. I’m part English and have a lot of family in England; none of us are upper class (solidly middle-to-working, actually), and we span the generations of post-second World War Britain to very young ‘New Britain.’ Having read Lyall’s hilarious list of the differences between Britishisms and Americanisms in the NYTimes, and knowing Lyall is a good writer, I was looking forward to reading The Anglo Files.
There are parts that are very funny, and ring almost embarrassingly true (the number of apologies uttered per day is astounding, and I’m not exempt from this strange little habit). But by halfway through, it was clear that Lyall is exaggerating British behavior and psychology, possibly for entertainment’s sake, but possibly because she has only been exposed to a smidgen of England's population (and therefore seems to have a hard time making sense of a small group of rich eccentrics). The examples she gives—and the book feels, at times, like a long list of examples—are almost bizarrely focused on upper class, nouveau wealthy, or titled white English people. It is as if, in Lyall’s decades-long experience of living in London, she never once was exposed to Russell Brand, Kate Atkinson, Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephan Moffat, or Hilary Mantel; nor does she seem to have come across any 'regular' person (her kids’ teacher? her hairdresser? the people down at the local garden nursery?). She attempts, for example, to analyze all of British sexuality by citing upper-class boarding school peculiarities and deprivations, but has to back-peddle a bit by noting that these “practices” no longer really go on--and maybe only went on at Oxford and Eton. It’s a shame Lyall lived in such a bubble during her time in England. She might have seen some of the more interesting and admirable facets of its culture and people, as well as the quirky and irritating angles. It’s great to laugh at oneself, and tear things apart to analyze them, but to do it by using twenty percent of an entire culture as the sole example is bad journalism, and not particularly rewarding for the reader.
There are parts that are very funny, and ring almost embarrassingly true (the number of apologies uttered per day is astounding, and I’m not exempt from this strange little habit). But by halfway through, it was clear that Lyall is exaggerating British behavior and psychology, possibly for entertainment’s sake, but possibly because she has only been exposed to a smidgen of England's population (and therefore seems to have a hard time making sense of a small group of rich eccentrics). The examples she gives—and the book feels, at times, like a long list of examples—are almost bizarrely focused on upper class, nouveau wealthy, or titled white English people. It is as if, in Lyall’s decades-long experience of living in London, she never once was exposed to Russell Brand, Kate Atkinson, Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephan Moffat, or Hilary Mantel; nor does she seem to have come across any 'regular' person (her kids’ teacher? her hairdresser? the people down at the local garden nursery?). She attempts, for example, to analyze all of British sexuality by citing upper-class boarding school peculiarities and deprivations, but has to back-peddle a bit by noting that these “practices” no longer really go on--and maybe only went on at Oxford and Eton. It’s a shame Lyall lived in such a bubble during her time in England. She might have seen some of the more interesting and admirable facets of its culture and people, as well as the quirky and irritating angles. It’s great to laugh at oneself, and tear things apart to analyze them, but to do it by using twenty percent of an entire culture as the sole example is bad journalism, and not particularly rewarding for the reader.