Times Books - August 2007

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID
By Bill Bryson
Doubleday
ISBN 0-385-60826-8

Nostalgia isn’t popular. You’re not supposed to be backward-looking when political leaders jostle to appear cool and fashionable ‘cred’ is measured by how much rubbish TV you profess to like: a knowledge of Big Brother rather than Bach. Daring to say it ‘aint necessarily so that ‘things can only get better’ is akin to professing a fondness for repro furniture and heritage bric-a-brac. So for Bill Bryson to nail his moist handkerchief to the mast of sentiment would be brave, were it not for that fact that the man can do no wrong, as his book sales testify. In ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt’ kid he takes us on yet other amiable ramble through terrain viewed with his characteristic mixture of bemused wit, acerbic astonishment and sweet benevolence. Yet this is a sentimental journey into a ‘greener, quieter, less intrusive world’ and we come closest to the real Bryson in this his first true memoir. Seventeen years ago he opened ‘The Lost Continent’ with the memorable words, ‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. Now he comes full circle, to recall his Iowa childhood in ‘a book about not very much; about being small and getting larger slowly.’ But of course, being about that, it encompasses so much of human experience you want to smile and sob at once.

In that first travel book, driving through small town America, he took many a swipe at the thoughtless destruction of modernism, once or twice allowing an uncharacteristic note of real anger to creep in: ‘…before long there will be no more…sleepy rural pubs and the countryside will be mostly shopping centres and theme parks. Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are talking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.’ In a way this new book is an exposition of that theme. Researching it, in need of illustration, he went to the Des Moines ‘Register and Tribune’ (where both his parents worked as journalists) to browse the photo library he remembered vividly as the complete visual history of his city in the twentieth century. He was told that the vast archive had been thrown out ages ago – not given to the state historical society or city library, but ‘recycled for the silver in the paper.’ There is no benevolence in Bryson’s comment, ‘So now not only are the places mostly gone, but there is no record of them either.’

Bill Bryson was born in 1951, into prosperous post war America: ‘the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron.’ His father was one of the best sports writers of his generation (the pride is touching), his mother a writer on women’s topics whose speciality was burning food at home, and whose absentmindedness once sent little Billy to school wearing his sister’s lime green Capri pants and ‘the laughter could be heard for miles.’ When he was six, poking around the basement, he found an old green jersey with a golden thunderbolt appliquéd in satin across the chest. His father thought it might have been an old ice hockey sweater, left by the previous owners. But to Bryson it was the ‘Sacred Jersey of Zap,’ a garment for a superhero, which would bestow mysterious powers of destruction on its small wearer, aided of course by the cowboy hat, rubber bowie knife, and so on. So Dad called Billy The Thunderbolt Kid: ‘My superpowers were not actually about…doing good for the common man, but primarily about using my X-ray vision to peer beneath the clothes of attractive women and to carbonise and eliminate people…who were an impediment to my happiness. All the heroes of the day had particular specialities. Superman fought for truth….I killed morons. Still do.’

The fifties world was a safe one: cigarettes were good for you and so was low-level atomic power, whilst children played happily around clouds of DDT. ‘We didn’t need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water...child safety caps on our medicines, helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating.’ Adults, he recalls, had enough to worry about, with the Bomb, the commie threat, and the new phenomenon of the Teenager, which threatened public stability. Bryson’s evocation of an era is pretty-near perfect: tender and hilarious and true. It made me want to shout, ‘Hey Bill, I remember stores where the money hummed on wires and how they X-rayed our feet each time we had new shoes! I remember the Burns and Allen Show and had a crush on Kookie in 77 Sunset Strip! I was there!’ And when, remembering going to the newspaper, he murmurs, ‘I’d give anything – really almost anything at all – to pass just once more through that gate and see the guys in the Sports Department and beyond them my dear old mom at her desk typing away’ – he touches on the deep longing for ‘home’ (the real meaning of nostalgia) which tap-taps away inside
most hearts.