Growing up was easy. It required no thought or effort on my part. It was going to happen anyway. So what follows isn’t terribly eventful, I’m afraid. And yet it was by a very large margin the most fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene, and unnerving time of my life.
That sounds about right, just like my childhood and everyone else's, I reckon, so I went into The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid hoping it would be a nice, light, relatable book to listen to. One of the first stories is:
In the late 1950s, the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise that enjoyed a short but devoted vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or a wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn't need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I expect was what attracted my dad.
What made it unfortunate in my father's case is that he would do his isometrics on airplanes. At some point in every flight, he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet grunts to the task.
Since it looked uncannily, if unfathomably, as if he were trying to force a hole in the side of the plane, this naturally drew attention. Businessmen in nearby seats would stare over the tops of their glasses. A stewardess would pop her head out of the galley and likewise stare, but with a certain hard caution, as if remembering some aspect of her training that she had not previously been called upon to implement.
Seeing that he had observers, my father would straighten up and smile genially and begin to outline the engaging principles behind isometrics.
Then he would give a demonstration to an audience that swiftly consisted of no one.
This kind of story I found very charming and I would be smiling as I walked my dog down the street. Another example:
The only downside of my mother's working was that it put a little pressure on her with regard to running the home and particularly with regard to dinner, which frankly was not her strong suit anyway. My mother always ran late and was dangerously forgetful into the bargain. You soon learned to stand aside about ten to six every evening, for it was then that she would fly in the back door, throw something in the oven, and disappear into some other quarter of the house to embark on the thousand other household tasks that greeted her each evening. In consequence she nearly always forgot about dinner until a point slightly beyond way too late. As a rule you knew it was time to eat when you could hear baked potatoes exploding in the oven.
We didn't call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.
"It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.
Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes — burnt and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.
Unfortunately, these charming stories from Bill Bryson's childhood are greatly outnumbered by ones that devolve into flights of hyperbole to reach the punchline-- nosebleeds last for months and kids are grounded for years and six thousand players show up for a hockey game on the pond. I smiled the first couple of times, acknowledging that Bryson was describing the events through the eyes of the child he had been, but it eventually began to really wear on me. I grew annoyed and then bored. I also didn't much like the bits about the Thunderbolt Kid, the superhero little Billy Bryson imagined himself to be: a character with "thunder vision", originally a tool used for seeing through women's clothing, but eventually fine-tuned for reducing annoying bullies and teachers and other unworthy adults to lumps of carbon. The character didn't make me smile even the first time and it's used so seldom that I have no idea why it was included, let alone used in the title.
Bryson does describe a childhood in 1950s Middle America with affection and nostalgia, but I much preferred An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (and acknowledge that only one of these books was striving to be considered literature). It was certainly a time of hope and optimism (if you don't include the Red Menace, duck and cover and polio scares), but I don't know if Bryson really proves the case that it was a better time to be alive. In both books there are discussions and examples of classism and racism, but only in this book were there instances of overt racism by the author:
For the record there was one manned attack on the American mainland. In 1942, a pilot named Nabuo Fujita took to the air from coastal waters off Oregon in a specially modified seaplane that was brought there aboard a submarine. Fujita's devious goal was to drop incendiary bombs on Oregon's forests, starting large-scale fires that would, if all went to plan, rage out of control and engulf much of the West Coast, killing hundreds and leaving Americans weeping and demoralized at the thought of all that damage caused by one little squinty-eyed man in a plane. In the event, the bombs either puttered out or caused only localized fires of no consequence.
One little squinty-eyed man? This and his lumping together of all the black kids he met when he started high school made me uncomfortable.
Also, I usually enjoy audiobooks that are read by the author, and although I understand that Bryson has lived most of his adult life in Britain, his vaguely British accent is jarring while listening to him describe his very American childhood. That and his slight speech impediment makes Bryson not a natural narrator.
So this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting larger slowly. One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
I am really of mixed opinions about this book. It was hard to reconcile the conclusion that it was a happier time and place with the epigraphs that begin each chapter, often about strange and terrible news stories, including one about a 13 year old black boy who was beaten to death in Mississippi for the crime of whistling at a white woman. It would have worked better, for me, if this had had more of the charming stories about Bryson's interesting family.
