Often funny, occasionally exasperating, Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid bears more than a passing resemblance in tone to Jean Shepherd's stories about life in the 1950s that later became the movie A Christmas Story.
It wouldn't be hard to imagine the Thunderbolt Kid in the same elementary school class with Ralphie, Flick, and Schwartz, save for one big problem: It's a point of pride with the Kid that he managed to amass a record of absences from school that likely stands today.
"How can he have 26 1/4 absences in one semester?" [my father] would say in pained dismay. "And how. Come to that, do you get a quarter of an absence?" He would look at my mother in further pained dismay. "Do you just send part of him to school sometimes? Do you keep his legs at home?"
The Kid is, of course, Bryson, who grew up to write such books as A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island, and I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Apparently all those absences from school didn't hurt him, or perhaps he acquired an education by osmosis from his parents, both of whom wrote for the Des Moines Register, and from the plethora of magazines such as Life, Popular Science, and Look that flowed into the homes of the time.
Bryson's book is a recollection of his boyhood and of the 1950s, a time of unparalleled prosperity in America.
"By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three-quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners, and gas or electric stoves - things that most of the rest of the world could still only dream about. The 5 percent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 percent combined."
He mixes such facts with the hyperbole of childhood, talking about six hundred kids congregating at the river and roller coasters that were four miles long and a thousand feet high.
What no one knew until he wrote the book, however, was that Bryson was not human. He was the natural son of King Volton of Planet Electron, who brought him to Earth and placed him with an ordinary family (after hypnotizing them into believing that Bill was a normal boy) so that he could perpetuate the Electron creed.
The foundation of his superpowers was a wool sweater with a faded satin thunderbolt stitched on it, found hanging behind the furnace. When he donned it, he was endowed with colossal strength, X-ray vision, invisibility on demand, and the ability to zap all manner of morons, including school principals, little old ladies who wanted a kiss, and maniacal dentists, into smoldering lumps of carbon.
In most cases, it's easy to sort fact from fancy, but readers who did not live through the 1950s might well believe that Bryson is talking about another planet. This was a time when parents would send their children outdoors to play after breakfast and not expect to see them (unless there was blood involved) until supper time. There were no video games and few organized sports. It was normal to walk a few blocks to the bustling downtown and investigate the wonders of various department stores and maybe have a snack at the cafeteria or soda fountain after the Saturday matinee at one of several movie palaces.
For a child in a middle-class white home in middle America, it was an idyllic time. The less idyllic elements - the racism, the paranoia exemplified by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Cuban missile crisis and growing arms race - are glossed over.
This is not necessarily bad; Thunderbolt Kid is the story of Bryson's childhood, after all, and children are notoriously egocentric. But because the book is also a journey through the era, it is unsettling to read 3 1/2 pages about the Iowa State Fair and two paragraphs on Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was brutally murdered in Mississippi because he, a black youth, had the audacity to whistle at a white woman.
For the most part, however, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is an engaging look at a time and place of innocence and wonder, where children felt so loved and secure, they didn't even think about it, and when becoming invincible was simply a matter of putting on a moth-eaten sweater.
Contact Nanciann Cherry at: ncherry@theblade.com or 419-724-6130.
First Published November 12, 2006, 4:42 p.m.