October 31, 2008
On Tilly Witch
For Halloween’s sake, I bring you Tilly Witch, the 1969 book by Don Freeman (who was also the author of Corduroy). I had forgotten about Tilly, until I encountered her by chance this summer, and remembered that I had been obsessed with this book as a child. I have a feeling now that being obsessed with a book back then meant being in love with the pictures, pictures you could gaze into for extended periods of time, and detect new entire stories.
The pictures are pretty wonderful, dark and spooky, but made magic by juxtaposition– Tilly’s yellow surfboard, the witch doctor’s mask, the colour from the window in the picture shown here.
The story begins with Tilly Ipswitch, Queen of Halloween, suddenly finding herself in a rather jolly mood. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t be– after all, “if boys and girls get to have fun pretending to be witches, I don’t see why I can’t play at being happy and gay, just for a change!” But Tilly soon finds that playing at happy is sort of like pulling faces– once in a while, you might stay that way. Tilly dancing around with flowers, and on the eve of Halloween– even she knows something has to be done.
Naturally, and most politically incorrectly, Tilly hops on her surfboard and flies the the tiny island of Wahoo to see a Doctor Weegee. (Walla walla bing bang). He is horrified upon examining her, and writes an emergency prescription to Miss Fitch’s Finishing School for Witches.
Upon re-enrolling at the school where she’d once been star pupil, Tilly’s problems only get worse. The lessons fail to take, she keeps giggling, and finally she is sent to the corner to wear a dunce cap. Such degradation proves too much for the Queen of Halloween, and Tilly begins to get angry. Seething– she is not a dunce! She leaps up from her stool and stomps on her hat. It is Halloween night, and she has duties to attend to.
Tilly flies back home, takes some great joy in frightening her cat, and then sets out on her broomstick to scare children the world over. The story ends with a moral: “For Tilly had indeed learned her lesson. As long as Halloween comes once a year you can count on her to be the meanest and wickedest witch in all Witchdom”.
So the lesson is bad is good– and as a little girl, I think I appreciated such a complex message. The greater lesson being that non-conformity (and rich pictures) can really make a children’s book delicious.
Happy Halloween.
October 21, 2008
Slacks for Ella Funt
I am very excited, as this weekend I get to discover if my new sewing machine works. I picked it up at a yard sale about a month ago for $10, but have no clue how to use it, so am not sure if I wasted my money or not (credit crunch). However, a sewing savvy friend is going to give me lessons Saturday, and then after we’re going out to our local Hungarian to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. An exciting Saturday is destined then, though I am still not sure what kind of useless cloth item it is I am going to (dare I dream?) create.
What I really want to do make is slacks for Ella Funt:
Ramona tugged and tugged at Ella Funt’s slacks, but no matter how hard she tugged she could not make them come up to the elephant’s waist, or to what she guessed was the elephant’s waist. Ella Funt’s bottom was too big, or the slacks were too small. At the same time, the front of the slacks seemed way too big. They bunched under Ella Funt’s paunch. Ramona scowled.
Mrs. Quimby considered Ella Funt and her slacks. “Well,” she said after a moment. Slacks for an elephant are very hard to make. I’m sure I couldn’t do it.”
Ramona could not scowl any harder. “I like to do hard things.”
September 18, 2008
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder
Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children’s writer. She’s written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, “I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was.”
In terms of Snyder’s writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, “Happily Ever After”: “She’s every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like.” I recognized Snyder’s poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains’ second chapter: “Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow.”
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.
Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy’s journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that’s not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.
Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there’s trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home…
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.
September 3, 2008
Being Taken Places
Oh, how books do take us places. After reading Francine Prose’s Goldengrove last week, I absolutely had to watch the movie Vertigo. Which wasn’t a particularly good or convincing film all around, but there was something about it, how it came by its filmishness absolutely brilliantly, and was so thrilling to watch. How the movie and Prose’s novel informed one another; I absolutely loved it.
And then I finished reading Owen Meany, which became far less plodding halfway through. And yes, I understand that some of the plodding was a narrative device, but I think some of it could have been fixed by an editor. Still, I remembered why I’d loved it, which had been the very point.
Then onward to The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy. And I’ll say this– I think Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best writers I’ve ever read, ever. Out of children’s lit. and lit. the world over. I loved The Long Secret when I was young, and I could see why upon rereading– I was just as baffled and fascinated as I would have been the first time around, and not every kids book reread can do that twice. In both of her books I’ve read, Fitzhugh captures the awfulness and inexplicableness that is real life in a way I can only compare to Grace Paley (class differences of their characters aside, of course). In no way watered down at all, Fitzhugh renders that reality palatable for children, which is truly amazing. This is the kind of literature children deserve…
And how strange here to see the number of parallels between The Long Secret and A Prayer for Owen Meany— religious fanaticism, grandmothers, bad parenting, coming of age, summertimes etc. etc.– which would have gone unnoticed had I been reading in any other direction.
August 25, 2008
Goldengrove by Francine Prose
I’m not sure why my review of Francine Prose’s Goldengrove has to begin with a discussion of whether or not it is a Young Adult novel. (It is a novel that “takes its place among the great novels of adolescence,” says its Amazon product description, though I’m not sure this is the very same thing.) I’m not sure why my review has to begin with this discussion, because I know I wouldn’t care so much about a blurring between fiction and non, between poetry and prose, say, or even between a novel of graphics or text. But for some reason the distinction between Young Adult Lit. and Lit. Proper strikes me as altogether essential.
Which is not to say that YA isn’t literature, because it is, moreover it is the very literature that teaches us to love literature. Not simply literature’s adolescent sibling, but still, it is a genre onto itself.
So the question I’m dealing with now is, what makes a book YA? Is it anything more than a youthful protagonist? For often enough the boundaries are blurred, and it’s really quite difficult to tell. For example, the recent story of Margo Rabb, whose book’s YA status was determined by her publisher’s marketing department. And then there’s Francine Prose, a prolific novelist for adults (though she has written a YA novel before). Her new book is Goldengrove, narrated by thirteen year old Nico, taking place over one summer as her family is suffering from the sudden death of her older sister Margaret.
The novel was lovely, gripping and sad, made all the more compelling by moments of absolute clarity. The perfect details of family life, of breakdown and suffering– the contents of Margaret’s work-in-progress bedroom, a younger sister’s unconscious mimicry, the disturbing moment when young people realize that even adults are vulnerable. By Nico’s voice also, which tells the story with confidence, even when her own self is wavering. Her parents growing apart from her, and from each other, and then the process through which the members of this family try to put themselves whole again.
It is Nico’s confident voice, however, that leads me to believe that this book is YA. And I’ve written about this before, about the distinction between literature that is YA or not. The difference being that the latter creates a gap between the narrative voice and the reader, and as a reader goes from childhood to adulthood, they will cross it. Examples, some however inadvertent, are Catcher in the Rye, Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, a lot what Esther Freud writes, and even Harriet the Spy and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself.
Examples are not (however infinitely readable these novels might be) Special Topics in Calamity Physics (which I loved), Prep (which I didn’t), and (I suspect, though I don’t actually know) anything Harry Potter. Forget the third example (v.v. controversial), but with the first two, their young narrators were absolutely in control of their stories. Even when they weren’t in control, they were smart enough and looking back from far away enough that they would be speaking from a wiser place. As opposed to Holden Caulfield, who wasn’t, though many of his readers wouldn’t realize this until later. Or to the narrator of Hideous Kinky who (from The Guardian Book Club today) “merely reports the signs of adult meaning… The reader is left to construct the story.”
I mean that for this second group of examples, if you encounter these books when you are fourteen, you’d find the books much unchanged years later.
To say that Goldengrove is such a book is not to demean it. It is not to say that the book lacks an edge either, because Nico’s dealings with her dead sister’s boyfriend take quite a sinister turn by the end of the novel. And further, it does not mean that this book isn’t worthwhile for an adult to read, but I was conscious all along that I was not quite its intended audience. Even though it was a sophisticated book, and it was– very cool film and music references, its adult characters interesting and well-developed, beautiful writing and pointed insights. But the story was so firmly inside Nico’s head, processed in spite of her confusion, and though the story’s feel is altogether immediate as it goes, I wasn’t surprised at the end to find out that it’s being told from years onward.
I wasn’t surprised either to find that a work by Francine Prose would forgo that gap between narrator and reader. The only other novel I’ve ever read by her is Blue Angel, whose altogether creepy narrator coaxed a tricky sympathy that was most disturbing. If we could learn to get in the head of Ted Swenson, Champion Scumbag, then identifying with Nico is no great feat. It’s what we’re suppose to do as we read Goldengrove, but such a lack of distance keeps this from being a deeper novel. (Which is definitely not the case with Blue Angel, but of course these are two very different kinds of stories).
So why is this distinction important? Because if this was an adult novel, I’d judge it a weak one. Lacking a certain complexity, featuring a predictable storyline etc. etc. But as a YA novel, Goldengrove is brilliant. Which isn’t lesser, no, because I think a story for fifteen year olds has to be different than a story for their mothers. And to pretend otherwise– for the sake of the
book, out of courtesy for its authors, its readers– is to miss something pretty essential.
I enjoyed this book, but if I were fifteen again, it would have spun me a spell. And certainly it is no slight on Prose to say that fifteen year-olds are lucky to have her writing just for them.
August 17, 2008
Haiku Baby
My favourite thing of late is Haiku Baby by Betsy Snyder, the board book I recently gave to my expectant friend (who informed me she’d read it to her belly just as soon as the fetus had ears). The illustrations are gorgeous, suggesting all variety of textiles and collage, and the haiku are lovely, and as true to the haiku tradition as ones in English can be. “Rain: Splish splash, puddle bath!/ raindrops march in spring parade–/ wake up sleepy earth.”
July 29, 2008
Rereading Emily of New Moon
I reread Emily of New Moon this weekend, still riding the wave of recent L.M. Montgomery mania (which Steph at Crooked House rounds up here). I was surprised (but then not overly) to discover that my paperback copy was actually stolen goods, my then-school library’s ownership stamped on the inside cover, and with no evidence of a “discard”.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first encountered Emily, but she never entranced me the way that Anne did. I do remember enjoying the books, but also how difficult I found them, and I could never quite explain why, and Emily-lovers never really understood what I meant, but I see it now. First being that I read all of Montgomery’s books really young, and any of my understanding of Anne of Green Gables was probably due to having watched the Kevin Sullivan film, which came out when I was six. There was never an Emily movie, and so I was unfamiliar with the story. (This is interesting also to consider how the cinematic Anne influenced my impressions of that novel, considering how different it was to read Emily without such pictures in my mind).
That I had no “template” for understanding Emily might read a bit strangely, considering this story of an incorrigible orphan girl in PEI with romantic dreams and literary leanings, who is sent to live with bachelor/spinster strangers and changes their lives, investing a lonely old house with the heart it had lost, and bewitching every single person in town. That the novel is so remarkably like Anne, however, only shows Montgomery’s progression as a novelist between 1908 and 1923 (nine books later). Emily is a longer book, her character drawn with so much more detail, we get inside her head the way we never really did with Anne, her perspective maintained throughout the text. Her own progression is less a series of scrapes and lessons learned. She has not Anne’s fiery temper– her own outbursts are usually in protest to some injustice instead. She has a certain steadiness uncanny for a child. Emily grows up, but she never changes, she never relents.
This depth of character would have been what tripped me up back when I first read this book. The complicated nature of the others too– I remember being confused by Mr. Carpenter, who tormented the students who had potential in order to draw it further from them, and their ambivalent feelings towards him, and how I couldn’t comprehend it. Though I remember finding Dean Priest’s feelings for Emily a bit creepy, and I still do. Class issues– what it meant that Perry came from a place called “Stovepipe Town” and I remembering picturing a village full of men wearing top hats.
This time around, the book was a pleasure, to discover what I’d been missing. I liked the novel’s engagement with the wider world– stories of immigration, with history. As with Anne, I loved Emily’s bookishness, her passion for writing and how she’d have to do it anyway even if she’d never make a penny. The wise advice that she is given:
“If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten– if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though– and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you– but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice– by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess.”
July 22, 2008
So much can slip on by
I’m now rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I’ve visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion’s descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion’s consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I’ve also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.
Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing “One Two Three Four” on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson’s post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb’s struggles upon discovering she’d written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.
July 20, 2008
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
That a book has pictures, in my opinion, makes it no less a book, particularly if that book’s language still matters. If the images are enhancement and not just a flashy stand-in for story, and in Skim, a graphic novel with words by Mariko Tamaki and pictures by Jillian Tamaki, images are certainly the former. The images so vivid in their own right that they stand alone effectively when necessary, in individual panels or full page spreads, so perfectly conveying a moment– with expression, posture, that single perfect object standing in for a whole scene. Otherwise the language and images integrated– words stamped out in the snow, chalked on blackboard– in a perfect synchronicity.
But the language still matters– I was part of an audience that heard Mariko Tamaki reading from Skim on Monday evening, and rushed to buy the book between the sets. I almost fought someone for what I thought was the last one, but luckily they had another box. Reading from a comic book— I didn’t even know this was possible. Part of this is that Tamaki is a spectac performer, she did her work true justice. And the structure too– the voice bubble dialogue being terrible funny to listen to, but so much of Skim is written in a diary format, meat and substance as you like.
Skim is the story of Kim, called Skim because she isn’t, and she attends a private girls’ high school and it’s 1993. Always somewhat of a misfit, her isolation from her peers is only exacerbated after a local suicide when classmates establish the Girls Celebrate Life Club (“Teenage Suicide– Don’t Do It”). Skim is disgusted by feigned concern from girls who’ve spent years as her tormentors, and now they’re relishing the drama, discussing her in hushed tones– she wears a lot of black, says she’s a Wiccan, she can’t think of anything that makes her happy. And they don’t even know that she’s in love with her English teacher, Ms. Archer.
Skim is marketed as a children’s book, and will serve this demographic well, I think, assuring other misfits (nearly everyone) that they aren’t alone. Holding great appeal to older readers too, and not only because they’ll have it confirmed how incredibly lucky they are to be grown up, but also for such an engaging story, told with a great deal of insight and dark humour. Further, the acuity of its characterization, of Skim– that a comic book character could be bestowed with such a voice. Even in her most desperate moments, this girl’s company is a delight.
July 6, 2008
Rereading Anne of Green Gables
The first time I encountered Anne in print was in an abridged version of the story at the beginning of my Anne of Green Gables colouring book. I first read the novel when I saw seven or eight, my understanding of which was greatly influenced by the film. My Anne was always Megan Follows, Marilla Colleen Dewhurst, etc. Try as I might, these associations refuse to be shed. Which is not such a bad thing.
The last time I read Anne of Green Gables was seven or eight years ago, the first time as an adult, and I read my wonderful annotated edition. I remember finding the annotations interesting, though I can’t remember any of them now. I do remember being struck by the novel’s humour. As a child I’d taken it all as sincerely as Anne did, but now I could see that much of the book was really quite funny.
This time rereading Anne of Green Gables, I went back to my old novel. It has become quite a treasure, though the dust-jacket is gone (I hated dust-jackets when I was little, how they’d get torn and ratty, and I used to throw them away). I wish I could remember what the cover had looked like. My edition is a reprint of the very first edition, old style fonts and textual decos, illustrations by Hilton Hassell with a line of text underneath each on. On the inside cover is inscribed, “To Kerry Lea, From Grandma and Grandpa, Xmas 1986”. Note that from my grandparents, I would go on to receive hardback copies of Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island for my birthday and Christmas 1987. In 1988, the whole rest of the series arrives from them, albeit in paperback. Perhaps the most long-lasting gifts I’ll ever receive. What treasures now…
Kate Sutherland has been rereading Anne, celebrating her centennial (for indeed she turned 100 years in June). She’s been part of the group Blogging Anne of Green Gables, sharing rereadings and providing some fascinating insights.
Certainly Anne is a fine book for revisiting. Rereading is an absolute joy, and like any book worth a trip back to, it’s amazing how much the perspective changes. The mark of any good book, such richness, and multiple layers readers can reveal for themselves as time goes on. As most young readers do, I identified with Anne, in all earnestness I wanted to be her. Because of her triumphs, I think, in the face of all adversity. I think all awkward little girls (which is most little girls) want to believe that triumph is possible. They’re sold on Anne’s version of romance, of her poetry, of the wilds of her imagination, just as her schoolmates are at the Avonlea school. How she casts a spell on the whole world.
Now I see though, rereading, that though Anne is the impetus, her story is about how that very spell changes Marilla Cuthbert. How Marilla realizes her true self through this bewitching orphan girl. “It almost seemed to her that [her] secret, unmuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity.” How from the moment she encounters Anne, she is biting back smiles, swallowing her “reprehensible desire to laugh”. Until the end of the novel, when we find her in explosive fits of laughter, or when Matthew discovers her having a good cry. She learns to feel, to be, and to love. She is a wonderful, rich character, more than I’d ever thought to give her credit for.
I was also struck by the bookishness of Anne. Literary references scattered throughout the text, Anne’s quoting poetry, but it’s not just Anne. I’d always thought Diana Berry was a bit bland in comparison to her bosom friend, and so I was surprised to first encounter her as follows: “Diana was sitting on the sofa, reading a book which she dropped when the callers entered.” Her mother instructs her, “Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers. It will be better for you than straining your eyes over that book. She reads entirely too much… and I can’t prevent her… She’s always poring over a book. I’m glad she has the prospect of a playmate– perhaps it will take her more out of doors.”
The little girls of Avonlea read with fervour, exchange novels like I did stickers at their age. They’re all variable types, none of them quite like Anne, but the bookishness is a common denominator I found fascinating.
