Noted travel writer Bill Bryson has a real gift for making entertaining anecdotes out of basically nothing. His travel books are frequently hilarious, but if you think carefully about what actually happens in the books, there’s very little there. His gift as a writer is to inflate mundane experiences– waiting on line at a train station in Italy, dining alone in a Chinese restaurant– into vast epics of comic ineptitude. He really doesn’t experience anything out of the ordinary, but he manages to make it sound tremendously entertaining.
This comes in handy for his new memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, about growing up in Iowa in the Fifties, because, let’s face it, he grew up in Iowa in the Fifties. Not a whole lot happened to him as a child, and he’s refreshingly up-front about that:
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.
Not only does nothing happen in that paragraph, the whole point of the paragraph is that nothing happens. And he still gets a couple of good lines out of it. That pretty much tells you what to expect from the book.
The book consists of rambling passages of childhood reminiscences– childhood friends, embarassing personal stories, amusing anecdotes about his somewhat distracted parents– mixed in with sepia-toned material about America in the Fifties. If you’re allergic to Baby Boomer nostalgia, you probably want to give this book a wide berth.
(So why am I reading it? I’ll read just about anything Bryson cares to write. He quite literally published a dictionary, and I bought a copy.)
The family stuff is well done, and entertaining in the way that family anecdotes are entertaining. His father was a noted sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, and his mother was the home furnishings editor for the same paper, meaning that they were a little ahead of the curve on the two-income family thing. The book covers the period from shortly before Bryson’s birth (his father attended the famous “The Giants win the pennant!” game in 1951) until his departure for Europe at the end of the Sixties, but mostly deals with his younger childhood. There’s some soppy nostalgia here and there, but for the most part, it’s pretty entertaining.
If you enjoy his travel books (particularly the bits with “Stephen Katz” in Neither Here Nor There and A Walk in the Woods, you’ll enjoy this. If you haven’t read his travel books, well, I’d recommend starting there instead, unless you’re absolutely dying to read a memoir.