I grew up in the scariest period in American history,” writes Bill Bryson in his winning atomic age memoir, “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.” And he’s not exaggerating. In 1952, the U.S. successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb, then began looking for targets to use it on. Meanwhile, all across America, the Red Scare was on. To get a fishing license in New York State, one had to swear a loyalty oath. It was illegal to talk over the telephone in Bryson’s home state in any language but English.
But as a child Bryson sensed very little of this. Born in Des Moines, the capital city of the most heavily farmed state in the union, he grew up in a bubble of joy and excitement that will probably never occur again. “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” pays tribute to this era from a child’s-eye view.
This was a time of milk and plenty in America, and Bryson captures its largesse with gleeful exaggeration. The ice-cream sundaes were the best ever made, the soil of Iowa the richest ever farmed – “it is like walking around on a very large pan of brownies,” he writes. Adults seemed 20 meters tall, the ceiling of his grade-school gymnasium so high a kicked ball could never reach it. The winters were colder than Siberia.
Bryson relates these details with a whiff of irony and a stronger perfume of affection, but never the stink of sentimentality. Darting between his life and the trajectory of America, he slips in a few key contextualizing details. That while he was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, many of Europe’s children were chewing on lard butties. While countries devastated by World War II tried to rebuild their cities, the American engineers who had built the bomb were on to concocting something even stronger.
Bryson was as much the child of his parents as he was of the bomb – for the bomb was everywhere, and his parents, two busy newspaper writers, were less present. His father, lovingly, exactingly portrayed, is a hilariously recognizable American man of the period – cheap, but fascinated with gadgetry, in love with the new interstates being built, but skeptical of cooking anything that had been recently alive.
His mother, the home editor of the local paper, was humorously forgetful and beautiful. She was a terrific homemaker but no gourmet cook. There was no pasta, garlic, fish or cheese “not bright and shiny enough to see your reflection in” to be found in her kitchen, and yes, she did all the cooking. She had been the homecoming queen of her high school.
Memoirs are often the repository for loss or anger, but very few of them can do happiness well. Bryson does, though, because he knows better than to steer a thundercloud of guilt over this patch of idyllic times. The danger was there, and only now, as an adult, does he see the bizarre way it was handled.
“Public service films showed us how private fallout shelters could not only be protective but fun,” he remembers, “with mom and dad and Chip and Skip bunking down together underground, possibly for years on end. And why not? They had lots of dehydrated food and a whole stack of board games.”
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
By Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 288 pages, $23
