THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID
by Bill Bryson
Doubleday, £18.99; 320pp
NOSTALGIA ISN’T COOL. You’re not supposed to be backward-looking when political leaders jostle to appear edgy and fashionable. “Cred” is measured by how much rubbish television you profess to like: a knowledge of Big Brother rather than Bach. Daring to say that it ain’t 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 sales testify.
In The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid he takes us on yet another amiable ramble through terrain viewed with his characteristic mixture of bemused wit, acerbic astonishment and sweet benevolence. 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 that you want to smile and sob at once.
In that first travel book, driving through smalltown 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 taking 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 20th 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 postwar America. 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 absent-mindedness 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 6, poking around the basement, he found an old green jersey with a golden thunderbolt appliqu?d 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 wearer, aided of course by the cowboy hat, rubber bowie knife, and so on. So Dad called him “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, while 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 near perfect: tender, 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 . . . 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.
Bill Bryson appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival October 6-15. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com