Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird: A Memoir
by Doug Crandell, reading at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Wednesday January 19, 7:30 pm
When I was seven. I had memorized all the state capitals (honestly) and every episode of Charlie’s Angels, but I was still seven. I didn’t notice important things like my father’s drinking or my parents’ financial woes. I only understood things like Atari and skateboarding (and state capitals). I was seven!
Doug Crandell’s memoir Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird is set during the summer of 1976, when Crandell was a seven-year-old farmer’s son in north-central Indiana. It’s a story about mid-’70s farm life–although the Bicentennial and Jimmy Carter’s candidacy are integral, it’s about one boy’s aspirations (at the time) to become a pig farmer. And, if this ain’t yer bag, beware–reckon pig farming is nearly 80% of the book.
My complaints don’t involve Crandell’s subject matter or his setting, but his authorial dishonesty. Rather than reflect upon events as a 35-year-old narrator, he has his seven-year-old self think and act like a 35-year-old. No seven-year-old boy, no matter how perceptive, realizes that his “father, a 38-year-old man with five kids and no real idea what was happening to his wife, was simply trying to keep her occupied until she healed.”
Even if little Dougie was an über-mature child prodigy, depicting him as such doesn’t make for interesting reading. Though admittedly not a huge fan of the genre, I believe that creative nonfiction can be engrossing, when it reads like fiction. But Pig Boy reads like a book written by an overworked professor with a publication quota–the result of an otherwise talented writer trying to force humor and chapters reminiscent of college writing classes.
Crandell’s book isn’t awful. He thanklessly maintains his 1970s pre-tween perspective by using analogies that are simple and fitting: “smelled weird like the water left over from boiled hotdogs,” and, “pulled hard like miniature Budweiser horses at a sleigh.” These are moments of linguistic flair that a seven-year-old might come up with, and these moments–in which a child acts and talks like a child–are the best parts of the Pig Boy.