Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada - Hardcover

McCall, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679448470 ISBN 13: 9780679448471

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

His skates were too small. Or they didn't match. Or they were that ultimate humiliation for a boy trying to play hockey--girls' white figure skates. Add to young Bruce McCall's shabby equipment his pencil-thin wrists, weak ankles, and, as he puts it, "a fruit bat's metabolism with a tree sloth's reflexes,"  and you'll understand why he failed so dismally in the cold, rough world of neighborhood hockey in Toronto. Bruce's catastrophic career as a rink rat epitomizes the youth he recounts in this funny, moving, sometimes disturbing memoir. In fact, Thin Ice examines a boyhood so filled with failure and disappointment that the comedy and insight its author/survivor wrests from it--like his subsequent career as one of America's most admired humorists and illustrators--seem like miracles.

Bruce McCall's father, T.C., was an inaccessible tyrant. Bruce's mother, Peg, drank to blunt the effect of her husband's rages and to dodge the duties of taking care of six children. Still, Bruce did know some moments of pleasure as a child, especially in the small town of Simcoe, before T.C. moved his family to the dreary outskirts of Toronto: The Second World War offered its awesome matériel and its heroic men, milk bottles grew top hats of cream, and grapes hung free for the stealing in Mrs. Klein's backyard. But his parents' demons took their toll on Bruce, and the move to Toronto set the stage for academic and social disasters: He flunked out of high school and took dead-end graphic-design jobs, all the while envying the full-color culture and high-octane energy of Canada's muscular neighbor to the south.

That envy, combined with Bruce's passion for reading and drawing--one of the few positive bequests from T.C. and Peg McCall--became his refuge and then his salvation. His precocious reverence for The New Yorker magazine led him to invent entire comic worlds of artistic and literary creation. Ultimately, he read, wrote, and drew himself out of pennilessness and despair. Bruce McCall may not have been destined to glide around Madison Square Garden holding the Stanley Cup aloft, but as Thin Ice demonstrates, perseverance and talent can turn crummy ice skates--and even dashed hopes--into dreams come true.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce McCall has contributed written and visual humour to virtually every magazine in North America. He was a prominent member of the original National Lampoon, and has written for Saturday Night Live. His writing has appeared regularly in the New Yorker since 1979 and in recent years he has done many New Yorker covers. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

ere too small. Or they didn't match. Or they were that ultimate humiliation for a boy trying to play hockey--girls' white figure skates. Add to young Bruce McCall's shabby equipment his pencil-thin wrists, weak ankles, and, as he puts it, "a fruit bat's metabolism with a tree sloth's reflexes," and you'll understand why he failed so dismally in the cold, rough world of neighborhood hockey in Toronto. Bruce's catastrophic career as a rink rat epitomizes the youth he recounts in this funny, moving, sometimes disturbing memoir. In fact, Thin Ice examines a boyhood so filled with failure and disappointment that the comedy and insight its author/survivor wrests from it--like his subsequent career as one of America's most admired humorists and illustrators--seem like miracles.

Bruce McCall's father, T.C., was an inaccessible tyrant. Bruce's mother, Peg, drank to blunt the effect of her husband's rages and to dodge the duties of taking care of six children. Still, Bruce did

Reviews

YA. Humorist McCall (The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc.) spent his adolescence during the 1950s in a household that was cold, both physically and emotionally. Looking back from his current vantage point of success in both career and psychological health, he vividly recalls his experiences with a tyrannical father; an alcoholic mother; and four brothers who, like him, substituted writing and drawing for their missing parental relationships. The hurts suffered are evoked in detail?by an author who, from the outset, appears to readers as a survivor. For that reason this memoir should find a teenage audience, especially among those who have turned to books to escape similar family circumstances. While the facts of McCall's youth?and his family in general?are indeed grim, his humor shines through in many passages, making this laugh-out-loud material. Thin Ice would make a good candidate for reading aloud to students whose own reading skills are not equal to their interests and needs. Although the setting is definitely of another time, the pitfalls of ill-fitting sports equipment, overcrowded living quarters, unresponsive school administration, and unreliable parents are recognizable, empathy-inducing situations for contemporary youth at similar risk.?Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New Yorker humorist McCall (Zany Afternoons, not reviewed) effectively cauterizes his own dysfunctional family with his trademark red-hot, rapier wit. In short chapters that give a madcap serial reconstruction of a hardscrabble, emotionally deprived childhood in Simcoe, Ontario, circa 1945 (and, later, Toronto and Windsor), McCall, son of an absentee father and alcoholic mother who conveyed the impression that kids had ruined their lives, evokes a young Canadian's sense of inferiority to his US peers in the glory years of WW II and the postwar boom. Lacking its own Empire State Building, Hoover Dam, or Golden Gate Bridge, explains McCall, ``Canada declined to soar in any way.'' Canadian underachievement, combined with McCall's low family self-image, provides ample fuel for his rabid drollery: ``A rotten start,'' he muses, ``I don't know where I'd be today without it.'' Drawing at the refuge of his bedroom desk, McCall exercised a dawning artistic consciousness fed by comics, cartoons, and magazine illustrations, and reveled in the grand entertainment of the war, a ``triple header'' of news and propaganda streaming from Ottawa, Washington, and London; in news about ``flash'' American fighter planes; and in his own noble sacrifices on the home front, including the use of Soya Spread (a ghoulish synthetic peanut butter substitute). He loses momentum in reviewing his gradual departure from the wondrously twisted family nest to spend the mid-'50s as a failed commercial illustrator for Detroit--a waste, he says, but probably inevitable; it was a safe place to lie low while sorting things out and waiting for the master plan of his career to be revealed. Ultimately, a passion for automobiles led to a succession of editorial jobs with the Canadian car rags, and- -presto!--to this keen subversive's inevitable discovery of a writerly vocation that fits like a glove. McCall is always amusing, but his survivalist comic viewpoint is instructive, too, as a model for overcoming truly miserable circumstances. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Canadian-born McCall here remembers what appears to have been an unhappy and unsatisfying time on his native heath, attributing it to negligent parents who hated having begotten their six children and to the fact that he could never respond to the "Canadian style"?"the patience, the mildness, the taste for conformity"?which he found stifling. His discontent and embitterment led him to the United States, where he at last found his place in the sun. McCall, an illustrator and writer for such magazines as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, creates the atmosphere of his boyhood, youth, and early manhood with a keen feeling for words, although at times he appears guilty of gross oversimplification of the Canadian character. He seems content now, but his renunciation is not complete, for he has yet, after 35 years of living and working in the United States, to take out citizenship papers. The book does produce a certain sustained interest and is recommended.?A.J. Anderson, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Writer and humorist McCall serves up a bittersweet memoir of his formative years in Canada. With equivalent dashes of wit and pathos, the author recalls his youthful obsession with all things American. Plagued by terminal envy of the U.S. and its obviously favored citizenry, McCall spent an otherwise uneventful boyhood in a typical small town in rural Ontario. When the dysfunctional McCall brood ill-advisedly relocated to Toronto, Bruce's nightmarish adolescence officially commenced. Drifting aimlessly through his teenage years with an abusive father and an alcoholic mother, he relied solely on the comfort and the camaraderie that his emotionally wounded siblings provided. After dropping out of school and halfheartedly embarking upon a career as an illustrator, McCall eventually escaped to the promised land and carved out a creative niche for himself as a writer in the U.S. An often hilarious, always poignant autobiographical assessment. Margaret Flanagan

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679448470
• ISBN 13: 9780679448471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 249