Saturday, May 30, 2009

Good Clean American Fun, Sort Of

I am truly not sure how I feel after finishing Robert McCloskey's Homer Price (Puffin Books, 2005). I did enjoy the book very much, but when I recall the sunny hours I spent reading about friendly pet skunks and runaway doughnut-baking machines, there's a shadow around the edges. I'm not even sure I can define it, but I'll try.

First, a word about the book. Homer Price is not quite a novel, nor is it a collection of short stories, but something in between. The best comparison I can think of is to a sitcom: a short-running one with only six episodes. Each episode (neither "chapter" nor "story" seems right) is a discrete narrative, but you kind of need to have read the preceding ones in order to be fully in the loop and comfortable with the landscape.

Homer Price is a young boy who lives in the small American town of Centerburg in the 1940s.  (The first edition of the book came out in 1943).  The volume opens with an account of how Homer and his pet skunk Aroma help capture a small band of thieves who have stolen $2000 and some bottles of aftershave.  It progresses through a number of vignettes that are usually humorous or at least cheery--one involves a contest among three Centerburg residents to see who has the largest ball of string--but by the end, things have gotten just a tad creepy.  

The penultimate tale, about a Rip Van Winkle-esque stranger who has invented a giant musical mousetrap with which he proposes to de-mouse Centerburg, starts with a chuckle but ends with a shudder as the mayor essentially has to pay a ransom to keep the stranger from leading away all the children Pied-Piper fashion.  By the end of the book, it seems that Centerburg as we have known it is done for.  A new suburb has been built with one hundred perfectly identical houses, "down to the last doorknob."  The episode itself is funny enough: There is a problem with the Street-Sign-Putter-Uppers' Union, which delays the erection of the street signs in the new suburb, so the residents have a bit of a tricky time finding their way home among all of those identical houses.  On the other hand, it seems sad that this comical little town has suddenly exploded in size, and not even in a creative or interesting way.  One grieves over the mass production of these depressingly unoriginal and indistinctive houses.

Still, it's nice to read a book about a boy who says "Gosh," reads ten-cent comic books, and accidentally fills his uncle's lunch room with thousands of fresh homemade doughnuts (though there are racist elements that, sadly, infect the book).  Oh, and the uncle's name?  Ulysses.  His wife's name isn't Penelope, but there is another uncle named Telemachus.  If I figure out the deep meaning that somehow connects little Centerburg to glorious Ithaca, I'll get back to you, but I sort of hope I don't.  For now, I'm just enjoying the fact that in the final episode, we find out that the original name of Centerburg was Edible Fungus.  In spite of the eerie feeling that new suburb had given me by then, I appreciated the good laugh I got out of that one.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

If Jeanne Birdsall Ruled the Universe

Parents, even single parents, would always have plenty of time for their children. Children would finish their homework and then head off to do things like bake pineapple upside cakes, play soccer, write stories, and climb trees. Oh, and babies would fall asleep simply because someone had put them to bed.

While I wait for Birdsall to ascend to power, I'll just have to keep running away to her books. The latest, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), left me wishing that more reads could feel like that one: like a walk through a sunlit autumn lawn with piles of crisp leaves waiting to be kicked, tossed, or dived into. And seriously, it's not as corny as I make it sound. It is corny--I won't lie--but it is also really, really fun. The corniness is believable and natural and not at all sickening or preachy. The characters are completely and utterly lovable, especially, of course, the four Penderwick sisters Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty.

I think my favorite thing about the girls is their sense of Penderwick Family Honor. The sisters, each distinctively and delightfully quirky, have formed a solid front since their mother died in Batty's infancy; they are determined to take care of each other and their sweet, Latin-spouting absentminded-professor dad. Naturally, the foursome makes plenty of mistakes, but the scrapes the children get into are downright endearing ones, and the solution is never far away.

Sure, as an adult reader, you won't be able to shake the feeling that this story, no matter how much you are enjoying it, is not a depiction of real life by any means. But I found it equally difficult to shake the feeling that this is the way real life could be--that the world comes so close sometimes to the robust innocence in which the Penderwicks live--and I think I might know why I felt that way. It's because there was a time in my life when the world was that way for me. It happened during my childhood, when I hid in my room and flung myself into Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Those tales wove a universe unto themselves. But I can never read those books for the first time again. How lovely, then, that Jeanne Birdsall has come along to keep that universe alive.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

My Favorite Picture Book (This Week)

It's called Jamberry (HarperCollins 1995) by Bruce Degen, and I can't believe it's not a classic.  The book features a little boy--looking very Huck-Finn-ish in his straw hat and bare feet--and a big friendly bear who takes him on a fantastical tour of berry patches.  Blueberries float down a river and plunge over a waterfall; blackberries spill over the sides of railway cars that bounce finally into the station of raspberry-studded Berryland.  And the whole journey is peopled by animals who revel in each batch of berries alongside the two main characters. 

What I love most about the book is the language.  It's lyrical and light; reading Jamberry aloud feels like singing.  And it's whimsical: Almost every word  becomes "berrified".  Here's my favorite example, from the second-to-last page, when the boy and bear take off from Berryland in a hot-air balloon (berry-shaped, of course):  "Moonberry/ Starberry/ Cloudberry sky/ Boomberry/ Zoomberry/ Rockets shoot by".   (Man, I got chills typing out that quotation.)

And the best part about this intense delight I take in the book?  I can read it to my nine-month-old every day because it fits all of his criteria for a great story: It rhymes, it's short, and it has lots of interesting shapes and colors.  Sounds good to me, too.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

See, This Is Why I Read Kids' Books

It's one of the reasons, anyway.  It's also why, when I dabble in writing fiction, these days my writing always turns out to be for kids.  I'm talking about the tendency of modern adult fiction to walk almost exclusively on The Dark Side.  Now, I'm not saying writers shouldn't have sad or even disturbing elements in their tales, and I'm not even against all violence in stories, but I really don't want or need to read stories that just make me feel worse about the world.

Recently I borrowed Watchmen (DC Comics, 1986) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  I was very excited to read it; I like graphic novels (the good ones), and I love superheroes, and several people whose opinion I respect enjoyed this book.  I didn't get far, though.  The story involves quite a bit of flashback, and I quit reading shortly after one such flashback to the end of the Vietnam War in which one of the (American) super-characters shoots a Vietnamese woman who is very pregnant with his child.  I asked my husband, who had read the book twice, if the rest of it was equally upsetting, and he said, "Yeah, it gets worse.  You shouldn't read it."  Done.  Snap went the covers, and I moved on to something else.

This is a book that has won awards and inspired what looked to me like a cool movie (no longer on my list of must-sees).  Why do writers have to go so far?  There have to be problems and distasteful characters in every story, but do I have to walk around with the image of that woman and her unborn baby lying in a bloody heap on the floor of a bar?  It's kind of a good reality check, I guess.  It reminds me to be grateful for writers who don't do that.  

Come to think of it, the last modern adult novel I read--Infinite Jest (Back Bay Books, 1997) by David Foster Wallace--didn't hold me until the end, either.  It was some of the best writing I've ever read.  There is no doubt that Wallace really was a living, breathing, actual genius.  But I stopped reading during a scene with a burglary when the bungling criminals gag the owner of the house, who happens to have a bad cold.  He only speaks French and they only speak English, so they don't understand that he is telling them that gagging him will kill him since he can't breathe through his nose.  After he suffocated, I closed the book.  It's supposed to be dark humor, but honestly, that kind of humor I can do without.

Oh, well.  We all have our preferences, right?  And at the moment I am pretty pumped because I finally got my hands on Jeanne Birdsall's latest: The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Knopf, 2008).  I'm hoping for a good rabbit chase like last time, but even without that, I'm looking forward to a great story.