Cultural Dessert

'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' by Bill Bryson

25 June 2007

About 15 years ago, my cynical friend Tony was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about a travel book he was reading by a then little-known American author called Bill Bryson. This guy, said Tony, had taken a road-trip across America and had written a hilarious account of the small towns he had encountered and their peculiar inhabitants. Bill Bryson was the American who understood irony - he was more cynical than my cynical friend Tony. I didn't actually read 'The Lost Continent' until years later. Tony couldn't let me read his copy because, typically, he had borrowed it from a girl he had been seeing but was no longer seeing but hoped he might see again in which case he would need to be able to return her book. When I finally got to read 'The Lost Continent' I loved it too - everybody loves Bill Bryson don't they? He has a great knack of capturing the absurdities of the places he visits and marveling at the ridiculousness of the people he meets without ever ridiculing them, and maintaining his own likeable persona through a healthy dollop of self-deprecation. I've read quite a few Bill Bryson books now and they are all extremely entertaining. I think his style works best when his descriptions of places are sprinkled with chance encounters with the strangest of strangers - for me his least successful book was 'Neither Here Nor There', his European journey where language barriers restricted those chance conversations. He also has a tendency to wear his research on his sleeve - sometimes bombarding you with too many interesting facts and statistics. I found his science book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' a little hard-going - not because it wasn't constantly fascinating but there just seemed to be too much to take in. You do feel, though, that this is because Bryson is himself utterly fascinated and dying to tell you - and it is this raw enthusiasm that makes him so appealing. I've just finished reading his childhood reminiscences 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' which tells us what it was like growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s and thereby provides a comprehensive picture of fifties America. Extremely enjoyable and incredibly funny this was Bryson at his best - perhaps because this journey into the past covered a much longer period than his geographical journeys so there were many more bizarre encounters from which to cull his anecdotes - plus a highly entertaining new central character: the young Bill Bryson. Despite his familiarity with the territory, the usual Brysonic thoroughness of research is evident - with some great quotations from newspapers and magazines of the period opening each chapter. But above all you get a great sense of the affection Bryson feels for his family, friends and the place he grew up - despite, or perhaps because of, their baffling oddities.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:37 pm