The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Unlike many households where the elongated call of a child’s name denotes dinner as in Taaaaannnyyyyaaaa. In the Bryson household it would seem, the explosion of forgotten potatoes was a call to the table. From the beginning of Bill Bryson’s childhood memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, I am instantly taken with his mother. Mrs. Bryson is a total contradiction in terms for a women of her time, an age that created the very picture of a domestic goddess. Although she is the home editor for the ‘Register’ Iowa’s local paper, she could neither cook, clean nor remember her children’s birthdays - or things in the oven for that matter. She instead runs between home and work, in a blaze of disorganization. Burning food black and serving it up to a husband, who will only eat food burned beyond recognition and taste. It was, as Bryson describes a match made in heaven and so begins Bryson’s wonderful romp through his all American childhood, a very sweet and lovingly tribute to his family and to the fifties. To his credit he honestly admits that there is not a lot of substance or story to his upbringing. Little illness, adversity, or drama pitches the story; it is still however one of the most entertaining books I have ever read.

Bryson’s hold on the reader is of course his fabulous sense of humour, which spins stories of his mothers cooking, strange family relatives and visits to the local drug free dentist into a fever pitch of hilarity. I recommended this book to my friend Megan, who had to call me while reading it on the bus, so that her sudden and intense bursts of laughter would not be mistaken for madness. What also makes this book remarkable is that the devil is truly in the details of our lives. By carefully collecting the details, he builds a picture of his family and their many quirks, his little town of Des Moines, and of the 1950’s. The birth of our society as we know it. He talks, among many things about the consumer rituals of his time, when visitors would come as much to see their new fridge as to see the family. I thought about the consumer rituals of today, when someone who doesn’t have a fridge would actually rate as more of curiosity. My friends Kath and James are still the subject of admiring conversations about how they live without a TV or microwave, as if they were surviving without limbs. How the world has changed.

Although the 1950’s was a precursor to our manic consumer age, (Bryson quotes that in 1951 Americans owned 80% of the worlds electrical goods), there is still a lovely sense of innocence about the time. Or perhaps it was more ignorance. As Bryson comments “the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you”. The book is peppered with now famous advertisements of doctors endorsing cigarettes, svelte families exclaiming their happy because they eat lard, and diets based on eating hygienically treated tapeworms. “Never” as Bryson puts it, “have people looked so ridiculous and so happy at the same time.” What really struck me about the book was people’s blind trust of not only consumer goods but technology, particularly nuclear technology. In the fifties, it seems atomic bomb blasts were the hippest of tourist attractions. During which people clamored to have their radioactivity read as they sucked down ‘atomic’ cocktails. Containing more I am sure than they expected.

Despite having marveled at naivety of the age, I had to wonder. What will be revealed about the products and weapons of my time, that will make me realize just how stupid and innocent my own era was. Reading about Bryson’s fifties is a bit like going to an alternative universe, where life is both completely different but startlingly parallel. It gives a personal dimension into the history, politics and culture of the 1950’s, bringing it into colourful life. However, I warn you, read only in close confines or within earshot of those who love you. I hysterically laughed my way through most of the book, had I been in public the men in white coats might have carted me away.