Two Boys Growing Up
in Pre-World War II
Thirties Guys by Charles Walnut began from memory, as a reminiscence of his boyhood before World War II, but the book became fiction as the places and people and situations took on a life of their own, and the story began unfolding in a narrative form. Charles Walnut doesn't think of Thirties Guys as a look back. We are there, as the author is, as the story is told.
The characters in the book are any age we imagine them to be. Nukie and Gus, the main characters, are alive in the present--their present--and seldom look beyond it. As teenagers they wonder vaguely what is in store for them. "You are what you are," says Nukie, the philosopher, "no matter what happens to you. I'm looking forward to finding out." "I guess I'll take whatever comes," says the practical and steady Gus.
Nukie and Gus are dissimilar, but they are linked in a friendship that neither would ever abandon. In Thirties Guys, Charles Walnut conveys the innocence of the years before World War II-into which the two boys are drawn-and how Gus and Nukie never quite lose that innocence. Gus, who tells the story in the book, is the more average of the boys whose lives we follow into adulthood. As he says of himself, "I've always been able to focus on what I was doing when I had to, even if it didn't interest me very much at the time. I knew it was the only way to get ahead." Nukie's head is full of half-formed ideas but he lacks the will to concentrate. His life is unpredictable, unplanned, but he seems to enjoy it. He is a survivor.
Hints of the future come in devious ways, in life and in Thirties Guys: the boy at summer camp who later builds the electronic calculator; the posturing European dictators in the newsreels who make Gus and Nukie laugh, and who they later fear, and then fight; how TV affects Nukie's life; the intrusion of hallucinogens into the boys' quiet world, and the loss of Gus's younger brother as a result of them.
In Charles Walnut's Thirties Guys there are no judgments made about the past, nor about the present and what it may lead to, but we remember pre-World War II, and the boys who grew up in that time. |
