A Fair Trade Book
Title: The Life and Times
of the Thunderbolt Kid
Author: Bill Bryson
Author's web site: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/bill-bryson/1017933/
Date: 2006
Publisher: Broadway / Random
House
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1936-4
Length: 271 pages
Illustrations: black-and-white
photos
Quote: “My mother...sent me to
school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my
upbringing.”
Yes. It's true. Not only
gifted writers, but gifted funny writers, have had reasonably happy,
normal childhoods...maybe with a tiny bit higher grades in school, more
independence, more early insights into the grown-up world than the average
child, and then again maybe not. In this book Bill Bryson makes the
unconvincing claim that growing up in the middle of the twentieth century, in
the middle of the United States, made him a sort of median point defining
normalcy...oh right. Normal children do not learn to write like Bryson.
For starters Bryson's father was a professional sports writer. The elder Bryson
wrote for the newspaper in Des Moines and taught his son, among other things,
to write of Iowa with pride, even if he did open another book with, "I came from Des Moines. Somebody had to."
The Thunderbolt Kid was, of
course, Bryson's imaginary secret identity as a superhero, inspired not by the
model horses—they came later—but by a sweater with a streak-of-lightning design
down the front. At intervals his narrative breaks into Thunderbolt Kid
fantasies. A restaurant routinely let children draw a wrapped package out of a
box. Bryson, hoping for a model stagecoach like the one his sister brought home,
draws a package containing a doll. You only get one try, a man tells little
Bill; you'll have to find a girl friend to give the doll to... “A moment
later, he was just...a smoldering spot on the carpet.” Or, after being insulted by a bigger, older child, “Two days later the soaking
spring rains came and put” (the whole family) “on their tar-paper roofs, where
they were rescued one by one...they didn't realize...that the storm
clouds...had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of...the
Thunderbolt Kid.” Or, when Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote a book about the
trashiness of the comics the boys collected and caused the local store to “fill
with anodyne comic books featuring Archie and Jughead or...Donald Duck,” “I
vaporized Wertham, needless to say.”
Early reviews of this book
were enthusiastic; readers had just followed Bryson along the Appalachian Trail
in A Walk in the Woods 
and around Australia In a Sunburned Country
,
which had been two of the books over which I'd giggled or chortled enough to
end up reading them to my husband as bedtime stories. (He read the Bible to me
on Saturdays, and I read funny books to him before lights-out.) Major newspapers
had been similarly primed to rave, and had raved. Tom Brokaw called Thunderbolt
Kid a national treasure. The Wall Street Journal reviewer nailed it:
“so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too
hard to take offense.”
and around Australia In a Sunburned Country,
which had been two of the books over which I'd giggled or chortled enough to
end up reading them to my husband as bedtime stories. (He read the Bible to me
on Saturdays, and I read funny books to him before lights-out.) Major newspapers
had been similarly primed to rave, and had raved. Tom Brokaw called Thunderbolt
Kid a national treasure. The Wall Street Journal reviewer nailed it:
“so humorous and so affectionate that those being ridiculed are laughing too
hard to take offense.”
The New York Times reviewer
went a little too far, describing Bryson as “equal parts Garrison Keillor,
Michael Kinsley, and...Dave Barry.” Thunderbolt Kid has its place among Lake Wobegon Days, The Shepherd the Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog
, When Sisterhood Was in Flower, and P.J. O'Rourke's Baby Boom
as stories
of growing up in mid-twentieth-century America, and Bryson is indeed funny...I'll allow the comparison to Michael Kinsley, but Keillor and Barry (and also Florence King and P.J. O'Rourke) are incomparable. Other writers can only suffer by comparison with them.
, When Sisterhood Was in Flower, and P.J. O'Rourke's Baby Boom as stories
of growing up in mid-twentieth-century America, and Bryson is indeed funny...I'll allow the comparison to Michael Kinsley, but Keillor and Barry (and also Florence King and P.J. O'Rourke) are incomparable. Other writers can only suffer by comparison with them.
That's too bad because Thunderbolt Kid is not a book that deserves to suffer. It's a nostalgia trip for baby-boomers; for the young, it warrants comparison with Clarence Day's family memoirs (which I thoroughly enjoyed in middle school)--you may be unable to share the nostalgia trip, but you can still laugh out loud at the stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment