The TV Kid

 A few years ago, in a used bookstore, I came across an old copy of a children's book called the The TV Kid by Betsy Byars. I had fond memories of reading the book in the 4th grade or so, so I bought the faded copy to take home and read again, which I didn't do it until just a few days ago. As I remembered, the story is easily summed up as follows: a lonely boy who lives with his single mother in a motel they run is bitten by a rattlesnake one day while out exploring. The boy is a fanatical TV viewer and often references TV shows and characters in his ongoing mental narrative of the events that unfold. 

Sign in Utah (my photo, 2011).

Many Gen Xers were raised by television, so to speak, and it's in fact one of the defining characteristics of what shaped our generation (this is how generations are defined, more or less). I was probably on the more severe end of this Gen X continuum, in that like Lennie (our character), I was a lonely, quiet kid and had moved more than most kids (due to my father's being transferred and my parents' divorce). Television and reruns especially (also a favorite of Lennie's, as he references shows like The Brady Bunch and Bonanza) provided a kind of solace and refuge, and there wasn't much quite like the feeling of settling into thick carpet with a glass of Coke to watch reruns on afternoon TV as a way to assuage feelings of loneliness and being out of place (and spectacularly bad at sports). 

Lennie's story thoughtfully takes us to a place where the hero realizes, in the aftermath of his snakebite, the falseness of television and the reality of the people around him and even, appropriately so for a book with older elementary readers as its target audience, the value of reading and education. He writes a report about his snakebite experience and learns to apprepriate the people around him, including the visitors to his motel and a new policeman friend. There are a few striking, even heartbreaking lines in this book, a minor novel from a writer known for other works, including Lennie's thought that he sometimes thinks maybe he "needs to take acting lessons on how to be a person."

Lennie's realization about TV is all well and good for a story (and the snakebite as an awakening agent of change or epiphany is a nice, 4th-grade-level metaphor), though it's perhaps too obvious to point out the irony of this message being revealed through yet another kind of storytelling. It was a standard 1960s-80s perspective to denigrate the value of television, however, so this kind of meaning-making is expected. For me, though, it's important to restate that just as the "real world" exists online even as we insist it is only found elsewhere, television has historically served as more than just a medium for unhelpful advertising and cheesy, worthless entertainment. At its best (even before the so-called golden era of streaming television), it was a valuable medium for communal storytelling with important series like Roots but also with less important sitcoms like The Brady Bunch that helped to bring people together while providing a common set of images and references. 

For me, though it's painful to think about and reveal, television provided an escape but also a salve for my young loneliness, and I still have positive (though not entirely pleasant) memories of eating macroni and cheese while watching reruns of old Planet of the Apes movies that would show on Friday night television. I still like television, though an old book like the The TV Kid (and other books) probably does more to help me with loneliness these days. So I pass this old book along, though I wonder what a modern young reader would make of the dated TV references.

One side note on this book: Lennie conjures an imaginary set of TV commercials in his head for a product called "Friend," a life-size doll companion for lonely kids. This is meant to be rather sad and pathetic (and it is), though it also foreshadows the introduction of the My Buddy dolls in the 1980s (which in turn weirdly provided part of the inspiration for the Chuck movies). Byars and the My Buddy dolls rightly hit on a growing sense of loneliness among male children especially, perhaps, which has in turn grown into an ongoing discussion of male loneliness in general, still with us.