The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
By Bill Bryson
Published by Doubleday, 2006

World traveller Bill Bryson tries to relocate the starting line but finds the road blocked by clichés – yet again he’s amusing, not laugh-out-loud. My review for The Nation, published on October 29.

Since I’m practically the same age as Bill Bryson and grew up in pretty much the same circumstances, and not all that far away, it was with considerable anticipation that I opened his new memoir about being a kid in the ’50s and ’60s.

I should have been more cautious. Bryson is always amusing, but he can be aggravating too. A born wanderer, he has an annoying tendency to lose track of where he’s going when he lacks the discipline of a good map.

To guide him efficiently through his considerable reserves of sentiment and sarcasm, he had a great map for “The Lost Continent”, a trek across America, and the Euro-tour of “Neither Here Nor There” and, perhaps his best travelogue, “Notes from a Small Island”, about Britain (the one that got this American pond-jumper appointed a commissioner for English Heritage and chancellor of England’s Durham University).

For “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”, Bryson – keen to stay home with the family for a while (currently in Norfolk, England) – goes scavenging again, as he did with comparative success for “Made in America”, his tribute to invention, and “Mother Tongue”, a joyful paean to the English language.

Here, unfortunately, he seems divided on the subject matter, it being himself. There are “genuinely sweet” passages about his parents and siblings, as Publishers Weekly put it, and occasional insights on post-war America that are quite clever, but Bryson often struggles to place himself in the picture with believable honesty. Even the Thunderbolt Kid, his childhood superhero-alter ego, remains a sketch, not a full-drawn character.

Elsewhere in the promotional hype, the US TV news anchor Tom Brokaw exercises the cliché “laugh-out-loud funny”. Some lines are funny. I like the one about the boy left on a fun-park ride so long, enduring “so many g-forces, that for three months afterward he couldn’t comb his hair forward” – but each to his own. These are chortlers anyway, not laugh-out-loud funny, certainly not as funny as Dave Barry, whose books are more understandably addictive.

Bryson’s hometown, Des Moines, Iowa, is painted with affectionate precision, from the newsroom where his parents worked and the mammoth department stores where he got up to much mischief to the cavernous cinemas where he, um, got up to even more mischief.

He’s at his best when he’s talking about the distinctions between the 1950s’ expectations for the future and the reality that happened, and in this vein he’s come up with “rocket mail”: a Des Moines newspaper report that the US Postal Service had successfully tested the delivery of mail via a guided missile launched from a submarine.

“Special delivery letters, one supposed, would be thudding nosecone-first into our back yards practically hourly.”

Nothing came of it, of course. “Perhaps it occurred to someone that incoming rockets might have the unfortunate tendency to miss their targets and crash through the roofs of factories or hospitals, or that they might blow up in flight, or take out a passing aircraft, or that every launch would cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a payload worth a maximum of $120 at prevailing postal rates.”

Otherwise the book is a mix of youthful reminiscences (much of this quite engaging) and a tiresome rehash of TV Guide and strings of dull social-history statistics.

There’s no point reminding people of his own age that “I Love Lucy” was a groundbreaking television show. If we didn’t realise that when we were kids, we’ve been told many times since. Among the many TV shows he mentions, it’s only with “Sky King” that he gets a little creative.

And he must be writing for his fellow baby boomers, because younger people won’t pick up the book unless they’re researching a school project and haven’t come across the books that Bryson himself uses as source material.

Similarly, there is nothing fresh in his rambles about the Cold War mindset, and ramble he does, several times retracing his steps to revisit atom-bomb tests, air-raid drills and fallout shelters, as if thinking he might have missed something the first time.

And thus the word “predictable” emerges, predictably, in another Bryson review. What about the other classic Bryson attributes? Sentimental, superficial, a compiler of saggy aphorisms whose tails he twists with wry humour? Guilty as charged.

There is also the annoying habit of throwing in the odd swearword for calculated impact. His use of the F-word is – well, predictable – enough that it’s counterproductive, especially when it’s only paragraphs away from “goodness knows”.

Bryson told The Guardian last month that, having worked hard on his last book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, he went for the memoir because it was “easy” and “I promised my publisher that I would do something more amusing … I wanted to do a book that I wouldn’t have to do a lot of hard thinking and research about.”

A little more hard thinking on “Thunderbolt Kid” would have been appreciated, and yet, somehow, I look forward to his next book every bit as much as I did this one – it’s a concise biography of Shakespeare!