February 22, 2014
On Rebecca Mead, her Life in Middlemarch, and the Strange Alchemy of the Reread
It almost seems remiss now to admit that I’ve read Middlemarch just once, and not until I was too old for it to become the foundation of my being. Because what a foundation, its purview so large and dense, the force of its moral sweep. Middlemarch is the novel that New Yorker Staff Writer Rebecca Mead has returned to again and again, as she sets out to explain in her new book, My Life in Middlemarch.
Not simply a celebration of George Eliot’s novel, however, Mead’s book is a testament to the strange alchemy of the reread. “A really good book can speak to you at a different stage of your life,” she told me during a recent telephone conversation
“With a book as complex as Middlemarch, literally there are different stories you can appreciate at different times,” she says. And even the same stories and characters are subject to change. While in her early experiences with the novel, Mead identified with Dorothea Brook’s inchoate longing, years later, it would be Casaubon who she’d view with sympathy. “You realize that he was just a very sad, middle-aged man who messed up. You can’t but read him in middle age and see the stripes of that in your experience.”
In Middlemarch, Mead sees stripes of Eliot’s experience as well, My Life in Middlemarch emerging as a curious blend of biography, autobiography and literary analysis. It’s the kind of approach to a novel—particularly a classic one—that university trains out of most of us. (The day after our conversation, Mead tweeted: “recurring question theme from Canadian interviewers: Did you ever think “how dare I write this book?” #thingsAmericansdontask”.)
But it was an approach that came naturally to Mead. “I studied literature at university and became aware that the way that scholars think and talk about books isn’t the way that ordinary readers do.” She wished her book to be an acknowledgement that “a sense of recognition is where a lot of the pleasure of reading begins.”
She continues, “Why do ordinary people read? They read because they feel that the stories they’re learning are enriching their lives somehow or they’re giving them a way to think about their own experience.”
While My Life in Middlemarch is concerned with Mead’s own experiences though (in love, work, parenthood, in relation to her parents, and her native England), her autobiography remains peripheral to the book’s central narrative. “I was happy with balance I struck,” she said. “Some people wanted more and wanted less. The book is very personal, but it’s not confessional. I think I must have been, without consciously thinking about it, channeling this sense of Victorian restraint.”
Ultimately, the richest life story in My Life in Middlemarch turns out to be Eliot’s own, Mead using the novelist’s biography (which was highly unconventional by Victorian standards, and even our own) to draw out the novel’s subtle underpinnings. Few critics have mined Middlemarch for what it has to tell us about motherhood, except perhaps how motherhood can come between two women, as it does for Dorothea and her sister, Celia.
On the basis of her own experience, however, Mead is able to see more deeply into the novel. An uncanny connection (of many) has Mead herself become the stepmother to three boys, just as Eliot was (by her husband, George Henry Lewes). And Mead shows how Eliot’s experiences as a stepmother are echoed within the stories of Middlemarch and its structure, these echoes revealing just how deeply a woman who never had biological children was able to intuit motherhood after all.
“If I could ask George Eliot any question,” remarks Mead, “it would be to ask her about not having children herself, whether she always knew that it was something that she didn’t want. For me, having a child has been most important thing I’ve ever done, for her not to have had that intensity of experience…”
One area in which Eliot did have intensity of experience, however, was in her relationship with Lewes, which Mead depicts as a love story far too perfect to ever work in fiction. “Their relationship was a real inspiration,” she says. “They had their ups and downs, but were intensely compatible. They had this amazing writers’ companionship. Their relationship was especially moving because they met well into middle age. They were both mature and seasoned, had experienced disappointment.”
While Eliot’s biography is indeed central to My Life in Middlemarch, it is the novel itself that structures the book, whose eight chapters are titled for the eight books of Middlemarch. Such a structure came about organically.
“As I was taking notes and figuring it out, it became clear that the titles were so suggestive, perfectly apt for describing aspects of [Eliot’s] life [“Old and Young”, “Waiting for Death”, “Three Love Problems”, etc.], and from that, the book flowed very easily. I haven’t written anything on this scale with such a structural conceit before, and I’m delighted by the aesthetic shape of it, very happy.”
“There were moments,” Mead notes, “writing this book where I was so deep in it everything fitting together, and I felt either I’m really inspired or I’m psychotic; it all meshed.”
It was pointed out to Mead in a recent interview that the connections might go even deeper, that her own book manages to recapitulate the moral story of Middlemarch, the journey from self-centredness into wider empathy. My Life in Middlemarch starts off with Mead’s own story and her connection to the novel, to conclude with a deeper understanding of her parents’ lives and relationship, through the story of Fred and Mary. Mead was thrilled to see this. “What a joyful experience it was to write it,” she says.
The book is a joyful experience to read as well, as attested to by the terrific buzz it has generated. That buzz is all the more remarkable for how much this isn’t the sort of book that any of us these days are meant to be interested in anyway, a celebration of reading a book that’s more that 140-years old, not to mention so much longer than 140 characters.
The response to her book, says Mead, “maybe speaks to a yearning people have to slow down. People are responding to my taking the time to slow down with Middlemarch, to go through it and to read so carefully.”
And not just read it, but reread it. Mead agrees here with my suggestion that there is particular relationship between rereading and the Victorian novel. “That attempt at a whole panorama… There is destiny, ambition, scale and pace that allows one to go back and revisit.”
But what a challenge is rereading with so little time for reading at all.
And here, Mead shares an anecdote about a character she encountered during her Middlemarch research. One of the eight original Middlemarch novellas had come up for auction, and she went to the sale. The book sold for $35,000. Mead told the buyer, “I wish I had that kind of money to spend on a book.”
She says, “And he told me, ‘You do. You just need to rearrange your priorities.’ With rereading, it’s the same.”
- Check out Middlemarch for Book Clubs
February 21, 2014
“every woman will benefit from reading it.”
What a thrill to find a nice review of The M Word in the latest issue of Quill & Quire. It’s such a privilege and a pleasure to be read.
February 19, 2014
On Milestones
Iris is 8.5 months old, which is really the age at which one turns into a human. She moves, she sits, she eats our french fries when we go out for lunch. Finally, it feels like we’re discovering who she is, and it’s no less miraculous to see it unfold having seen it all before. In fact, it is more miraculous than it was the first time around.
Partly, this is because we were so focussed and anxious the first time around, not having a great deal of faith in a baby’s ability to bloom into a human all by her very self. We were anticipating all the milestones, checking them off like these were our accomplishments, not really understanding how long the story of parenthood would turn out to be (and how we are actually incidental to so much of it). We were also always watching for these milestones to happen, which meant that very often nothing happened, and that was a little boring. And when they did happen, the milestones felt so singular, monumental. Our baby learned to roll over, and it was the most extraordinary thing in the world.
This time, the milestones have caught us off-guard. Our focus is so broad that we forget about Iris a lot of the time, and then suddenly, there she is pulling herself up to standing. On Sunday morning I lost her altogether, totally confused by how she’d completely disappeared, until I realized that she’d crawled under her crib and was playing there. She slithers around on the floor like a snake, and gets to wherever she wants to go (which is usually in the direction of paper she can eat. Somebody needs to invent edible paper for babies. They would make a fortune).
What makes Iris’s milestones most miraculous this time is that I have the scope to see them as part of a continuum. First, of Iris herself growing into her own body and mind, but also that every single human being has to undertake this journey in his own way. These incredible discoveries–of how our bodies work, that we can stand and walk, how strong we are, how fast we go–must be made over and over again. And each discovery doesn’t mean, as they did the first time, “Now we’re getting somewhere,” with the prospect of some kind of arrival, but instead the journey itself being the entire point.
February 18, 2014
The Not-So-Good Terrorist: Reading Zsuzsi Gartner’s “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”
This essay first appeared in No 83 (Winter 2011) of Canadian Notes & Queries, a publication for which it is a pleasure to be write.
Though Zsuzsi Gartner’s “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” is set with home and hearth at its centre, the story offers glimpses outside into the dystopian Vancouver that is the backdrop to most of Gartner’s collection of the same name. Speeding cars burn rubber on streets whose sidewalks are littered with overturned shopping carts, as well as “used condoms, syringes, and the inevitable orphaned muffler”. For protection, Gartner’s protagonist, “the recovering terrorist”—who is also a gardener—has erected a botanical barricade around her house. And in the story’s opening paragraphs with their vivid imagery of the barricade, we receive our first reference to the maternal as an explosive, brutal force.
The force is the proverbial Mother Nature, of course, whose foliage clumps and billows. A magnolia with “vulvic flesh… erupts in the living room window.” Blood grass is described as “knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk.” The recovering terrorist is Mother Nature’s agent, standing in the garden with a watering can full of fish fertilizer which she drops when another speeding car tears down her street, “a fifteen-year-old future ex-con at the wheel.”
The recovering terrorist is optimistically named, so-called for her membership in a support group whose membership includes, “Sterling, the tree-spiker…, Molly, who’d waged a campaign of terror against her West End neighbourhood’s johns.” She’d discovered the group by answering a newspaper ad, and now meets for support over Peak Freans and instant coffee. She has her sponsor on speed-dial, a former AIDS activist called Dieter who’d sworn off violence after a narrowly escaping harming an innocent child.
Our recovering terrorist, however, had not had the fortune of such an escape. Twenty years before, she’d set fire to a house “to bring a petty capitalist to his knees”, the owner of a company whose chlorine-filled diapers were exported to cause testicular cancer in third-world baby boys. The house was supposed to have been empty, but she got the dates wrong, and a child died, a friend of the family. The recovering terrorist was never caught, and paid no price for her crime, so has never been able to move past it.
Her guilt, however, hasn’t quelled her impulses towards violence, though she has found ways to divert them. The recovering terrorist, brutal Mother Nature’s agent, hosts a “gardening bitch” radio call-in show, issuing advice like, “Gardening is like warfare, and it’s time for you to call in the troops”. She recommends diatomaceous earth to kill slugs, which is “like crawling through ground glass.” She says, “An eye for an eye, as they say, a tooth for a tooth.”
Gartner further subverts maternal stereotypes by representing the recovering terrorist’s extremist tendencies as inextricably linked to motherhood. In fact, her impulses have never been so strong: “For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to die for something, or rather, someone. [Her son] is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.”
The recovering terrorist is called Lucy, though she goes unnamed throughout much of the story. This is partly a satire of the pseudo-anonymity of self-help groups, but also significant because Gartner makes naming an act of colonization, of possession, and in her guilt, the recovering terrorist no longer wants to possess herself. (And perhaps she just doesn’t like her name: “…a name that sounds like fresh fruit, an ingénue of a name. Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names—Squeaky, Patty, Julie—as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough.”)
That the recovering terrorist has named her son Foster indicates a suspicion that her possession of him might be temporary. Like all parents, she must strike a balance between keeping him safe and giving him freedom to explore the world, to pursue his passions, which (at the age of seven) include Pokémon, and mastering the unicycle. The former passion connects mother and son, as she is fascinated by the game’s playfully violent mythology, and the latter dividing them—his hobby has turned her into a foolish caricature of parenthood, standing anxiously on the sidewalk shouting, “Careful!”
Foster, when he was younger, “like all fledgling humans”, had what the recovering terrorist describes as a “hunger for naming”, and it was his mother’s job to feed it: “Manhole covers, squirrels, body parts, graffiti, discarded condoms, black-eyed susans, facial deformities of fellow passengers riding the No. 20 bus. That got name?” Now that he is older, Foster’s hunger is satisfied with his playing cards, characters with names like Vulpix., Lickitung, Dusknoir, and Slugma. And Gartner makes implicit a link between Foster’s hunger for names, and the recovering terrorist’s own urges to “inflict order” on her universe.
She is trying hard to stay recovering. When the dangerous outside world permeates her barricade via the speeding cars in the street—when they make her fear for her son’s safety and the sanctity of her home and neighbourhood—she tries to play by the rules. She solicits City Hall to install a “speed retardant”, and finds herself tangled in red tape idiocy. Gartner satirizes bureaucratic processes, and employs a most inspired literalized metaphor for the futility of fighting the system: the civil servant without a larynx, who holds his finger to his throat to emit robotic answers to the recovering terrorist’s concerns. “She is arguing with a guy who has no voice box.”
When playing by the rules gets her nowhere the recovering terrorist feels compelled to take matters into her own hands. She’s thinking of the children, of course; “For Lucy, it always comes down to the babies.” Just as 20 years ago she’d set a fire in the name of third-world baby boys, it is for the sake of her son on his unicycle that now she considers blowing up speeding cars along with their drivers. There’s nothing gentle about the recovering terrorist’s maternal touch, which is always further undermined by her collateral damage, the little girl she killed in order to protect other children: “It’s always the mother’s fault. As they say.”
As her son had been troubled by unnameable things as a young child, so too does the recovering terrorist continue to be, for these unnameable things violate her need for order. Her love for her son, for example, which, she admits, “complicates things.” In fact, she’s not even sure if what she feels is love at all, or if she’s confusing love with fear, with fear of what might happen to Foster and what would happen to her if she lost him. The recovering terrorist, with her unwavering faith in “an eye for an eye,” believes wholeheartedly that her son will be stolen away from her as punishment for her crime, that history is destined to repeat itself in order for justice to prevail.
Her sponsor Deiter also fears that history will be repeated, that the recovering terrorist is losing control. “I think you want to be caught,” he says, as Lucy stops attending the support group, and begins investigating homemade plastic explosives recipes on Google. And here Gartner’s treatment of the mother-terrorist becomes particularly complicated, and is made no less so by the story’s devastating ending.
Is Lucy once again resorting to violence out of concern for her son’s well-being, or is she merely using Foster to justify the violent urges she can no longer suppress, which she refuses to take responsibility for, “the mercury semi-dormant in her veins”? Is the recovering terrorist the devoted mother she professes to be or has she delivered her son into the world to be her sacrificial lamb? Or is the world such a complex place that each of these things might be true all at once?
With such ambiguity, Gartner disrupts familiar notions of both motherhood and fanaticism, investing “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” with its terrible and disturbing power.
February 13, 2014
Rereading Love Story for Valentines
Though there were a thousand other things I should have been doing yesterday, I neglected every single one to reread Love Story, the book which started my career as a bibliokleptomaniac when I stole it from the library at age 12. And at age 12, I thought this was the most romantic book in the whole world, rivalled only by Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, which I also read over and over again. (Elvis was so achingly tender and protective! He called her his little girl! Which she was, being 14 and all, but anyway…) Obviously, my definition of “romantic” at age 12 was suspect–I think this was the year I listened to “Everything I Do… I Do It For You” on my walkman, rewinding the song back to the start until the battery died. I wanted a boyfriend so bad that I drew circles around the word “boyfriend” in my copy of Love Story until I put the pen through the page. I was in love with Oliver Barrett IV, and I also loved the Beatles, which gave me two things in common with Jennifer Cavilleri, the smart-assed, bespectacled working class girl from Cranston, Rhode Island, who steals Oliver IV’s heart.
It really is every woman’s fantasy–blandly generic man-creature with dashing good looks, athletic skills and an inherited fortune to boot falls in love with you precisely because you are a smart-ass, bespectacled girl who is smart and mouthy. At the age of 12, I did not yet have glasses, but you can probably see why this spoke to me. I saw the movie version of the book a long time ago, and remember being disappointed in it. I think that for the sake of dramatic tension, the film makes a point of Jenny’s steel will being broken finally, but it doesn’t happen in the book. The course of love here really does run smoothly, and it’s a lovely story. It really is.
My original version of this book was a battered (stolen) paperback, and I was reading a similarly battered copy of Catcher in the Rye around the same time, so the two books became linked in my mind. And it’s true that Holden Caulfield and Oliver Barrett have similar backgrounds and similar narrative styles, address their readers in a similarly (dated) colloquial fashion. It’s true that both characters also know themselves far less well than their readers understand them (or at least their readers who are older than 12). Neither of these boys/men is very sure of himself.
(Note: my Oliver Barrett IV is not Ryan O’Neal. Gross. Never. Love means never having to say that your Oliver Barrett is Ryan O’Neal.)
I make this comparison, which still holds up today, to show that Love Story is not a terrible book. Just its title is sort of shorthand for barf-inducing, but as one who reread it as recently as yesterday, I can promise you that it’s not that bad. Until it is. And then, oh, it is so bad, because any love that means not having to say you’re sorry is one in which one person is going to have to die within a year or two, because how can such a love be lasting? (Which I know now because I am not only not 12, but I have been married for nearly 10 years.) And it’s going to have to be Jenny, who dies of leukaemia and reports that it doesn’t even hurt. Surely, the tidiest death in all of literature. She was a bit pale, is all, and then she died. And what can you say about that?
I tried to read Elvis and Me a few years ago, purely for fun. I thought I’d enjoy it but it was terrible, unbearable. But Love Story, on the other hand, I will probably visit more than a few times again before I finally shuffle off my own beautiful, bespectacled, smart-assed mortal coil.
February 13, 2014
Books for Family Day
Family Day: the statutory holiday that makes February almost endurable. Though as the holiday is still new and as a concept is sort of vague (beyond the “stay home from work and school” part), we’re all still defining what this day is all about. So how about: this is a day for settling your kids around you on the chesterfield as you read these excellent books that celebrate family ties.
The families in some of these picture books will be mirrors of your own, while others will provide a window onto a different kind of family life, which is just as important to encounter.
Let’s Get a Pup, Said Kate by Bob Graham: Bob Graham’s books are all celebrations of families, families of all different colours, shapes, and sizes, but I highlight this one for its story of Kate, an only child whose place in her family has nothing of the “only” about it. Graham’s detailed illustrations (right down to clutter in the corners), Kate’s parents who are individual characters in their own right, and the never-in-doubt love between the members of this threesome make clear the richness of their family life.
Never Let You Go by Patricia Storms: I chose this book already as one of my top books of 2013, but come back to it again because of its portrayal of family bonds. It’s never clear whether the Big Penguin is Mother or Father (or perhaps neither?), or whether there are any more members of this family than just these two, but it doesn’t matter. In its simplicity, this book shows that the definition of “family” is just as elastic as love is.
A Baby Sister for Frances by Russell Hoban: Being a member of a family is often not fun, as Russell Hoban is smart enough to make clear in this true-to-life book about a new sibling. “Well, things aren’t very good around here anymore,” reports Frances the Badger, since the birth of Baby Gloria, whose needs have subsumed Frances’ own in the family hierarchy. The story has a happy ending, but not a sappy one, and I think plenty of older siblings will feel good about a book that reflects the complex experience of siblinghood, and validates their feelings.
The Great Big Book of Families by Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith: This book is a terrific introduction to the diversity of family life in terms of members, traditions, socioeconomic status and more. Facts of life such as homelessness and unhappy families are acknowledged for a nice dose of reality, complemented by funny, detailed illustrations, which bring levity and tell stories of their own.
What a Family! By Rachel Isadora: Of the many exceptional things about this book, one is that it explains on its inside cover just what is the difference between first and second cousins, and cousins once removed—how useful! Isadora’s book provides the narrative for a complicated family tree, and shows what brothers, sisters and cousins across generations (and ethnic backgrounds) have in common, and what is different between them, celebrating both.
The Hello Goodbye Window by Norton Juster and Chris Raschka: This is the first picture book by Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, and it won a Caldecott Award in 2006 for Chris Raschka’s art, which mimics a child’s drawing style. It’s a lovely ode to extended family, and to the rituals that emerge from that precious part of life: visits to a grandparent’s house.
Nala’s Magical Mitsiaq by Jennifer Noah and Qin Leng:
Recently published by Inhabit Media, an Inuit-run press out of Nunavut, this story puts open adoption in the context of Inuit tradition, where adoption between family members is common. Two little girls learn from their mother’s stories that indeed they are sisters, though they both came to the family in different ways.
My Father Knows the Names of Things by Jane Yolen and Stephanie Jorisch: Fathers still remain conspicuously absent from so many picture books, and so My Father Knows the Names of Things makes for a nice change. Written as a memorial to her late husband, Yolen celebrates a father figure not for his ability to conform to prescribed gender roles, but for his wisdom, knowledge, and importance as a guiding force in his child’s life.
So Much! By Trish Cooke and Helen Oxenbury: I never met a Helen Oxenbury book I didn’t love, but this one by Trish Cooke is particularly charming, and a winner of many prizes when it was published in 1998. Mama and Baby are home alone one day, not doing anything in particular, when the doorbell rings, and rings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins arriving to hug that baby, to love that baby. Cooke’s prose is almost a song, and a joy to read, and readers will be particularly excited by the story’s surprise at the end.
In Our Mothers’ House by Patricia Polacco: In our library, there are a variety of books about families with two mothers, and many of these live on a shelf called, “Issues,” along with books about dying grandparents and another called Julio’s Gluten-Free Birthday Party. What these books mostly have in common is not their family issues, but that they tend to be really terrible. Which is why Polacco’s book is allowed to live on the real shelf with the rest of the books, I think, because no matter how many moms it has, it’s a work of literature proper.
She celebrates a multi-cultural family with two mothers and three adopted children, showing the richness of their life together, and also hints at the discrimination they encounter along the way. But really, what I love most about this book is that it sets an example of the kind of mother I want to be, the kind of family I want to have. A warning though: my husband is incapable to getting through the book entire without starting to cry.
Bumble Ardy by Maurice Sendak: I like the realities acknowledged in this, Maurice Sendak’s final picture book. That one’s biological parents can be a bit rubbish, for one, (so that when Bumble Ardy’s piggy parents gain weight and get ate, we all acknowledge that it’s not so much of a loss), and also that a caregiver (his Aunt Adeline) can become ferociously angry with you when you misbehave, and still love you all the same. Though this isn’t a feel-good story, of course—this is Sendak, after all. The family ties in this book are curious and unsettling, which contributes to the story’s strange appeal.
Further Adventures of the Owl and Pussy Cat by Julia Donaldson and Charlotte Voake: Not just anyone should be allowed to write a sequel to Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”, which we love at our house through its edition by Kids Can Press’s Vision in Poetry Series, but I’m pleased that Julia Donaldson (famed for her Gruffalo and rhyming verse) was permitted to do so.
It’s the story of what happened to this mismatched pair after their honeymoon (where hand in hand by the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon), when the wedding ring goes missing and they must embark to find it. The story is fun, and shows that family can emerge between the most unlikely candidates, and children need not be part of the equation at all.
February 13, 2014
Four Letter Word
In the mood for some Valentines Day reading, I’ve been dipping in and out of Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters, by Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter, which I reviewed in 2008. It’s a really great anthology of love-letters as stories with a fantastic line-up of writers. I particularly enjoyed the contributions by Miriam Toews, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lionel Shriver, and Valerie Martin. I’ve been interested lately in the life of the literary anthology, and this one with its short pieces and thematic approach is probably one that’s worth keeping on the shelf. I’m glad I did. And not just because when it’s on my shelf, I get to look on its spine, which in my hardcover edition is printed to look like a collection of actual letters bound.
Beautiful!
February 12, 2014
Our lives can teach us how to read a book
“A book may not tell us exactly how to live our lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now when I read the novel in light of Eliot’s life, and in light of my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel–not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. Middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one’s stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one’s heard wider.” –Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch
February 10, 2014
Be the Mavis.
Things are busy here. In lieu of a post proper, I bring you Mavis Staples, whom Stuart and I had the great pleasure of seeing in concert on Friday night.
February 5, 2014
On Truth, Justice, and Ramona Quimby: An Appreciation
I have heard rumours here and there that to children raised on Hogwarts and Lemony Snicket, the adventures of Ramona Quimby come across as a little bit dull. Perhaps so, but then the domestic has always been my literary milieu, setting for plenty of magic in its own right. As a child, I was wild about Ramona, about her “wonderful, blunderful” self, as she was referred to at the end of Ramona Forever. In her blundering, I suppose she was a forerunner for chick-lit heroines on shoe-covered books in decades to come, and it’s part of the reason I identified with her, but here is a serious distinction: unlike Bridget Jones on the fireman’s pole, to give an example, Ramona never ever lost her dignity.
To be an adult encountering Ramona again has been absolutely fascinating. First, unlike Rowling, whose magic spells allow us to forgive literary missteps, Beverly Cleary never misses a beat. The pacing, characterization and dialogue in these novels is brilliant. Nothing clunks. These books are really not so dated–I only remember the line in Ramona the Brave, when Mrs. Quimby announces she is going back to work, and Beezus responds with, “Mother! You’re going to be liberated.” I note that on a newer edition of Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Ramona is depicted as wearing a bicycle helmet, which seems bafflingly incongruous (but then I have this theory that “safety” is a conspiracy theory, and that’s another story).
Reading these novels with my daughter, I see they are tremendously useful for educational purposes. For my education, that is, Cleary’s stories reminding me exactly of what it was like to be little in the world. I have forgotten this, the injustices of childhood, which Ramona calls attention to and battles at every turn. And injustice it truly is, to have no say in your comings and goings, to have the ground pulled out from under your feet on a regular basis, to have your fears and worries scoffed at, to be shushed and quieted, shooed away from underfoot. Reading the Ramona books provides with tremendous sympathy for how difficult it is for a child to be in the world. Reading the Ramona books, I think, makes me a better parent.
They’re also useful to my daughter though, not for morals and lessons, but for everything that’s going on in the background. That Ramona’s mother and father are depicted as real people, for one, their experiences providing a whole level of subtext to these stories that I wouldn’t have picked up on as a child, but which I zero in on now. I was reading aloud the Quimby parents’ argument from Ramona and Her Mother recently, and it was so pitch perfect and hilarious:
“Ramona, don’t just stand there,” said Mr. Quimby as he laid the bacon in a frying pan. “Get busy and set the table. As my grandmother used to say, ‘Every kettle must rest on its own bottom,’ so do your part.”
Ramona made a face as she reached for the place mats. “Daddy, I bet your grandmother didn’t really say all the things you say she said.”
“If she did, she must have been a dreadful bore,” said Mrs. Quimby, who was beating batter as if she were angry with it.
Mr. Quimby looked hurt. “You didn’t know my grandmother.”
“If she went around spouting wisdom all the time, I can’t say I’m sorry.” Mrs. Quimby was on her knees, dragging the griddle from behind the pots and pans in the bottom of the cupboard.
It is remarkable how much economics factors into these books, much like how they do in our own family life. Though by no means poor, the Quimby family has to think about costs and expenses. A new bedroom is only built onto their house because Mrs. Quimby returns to work and they have the means to do so. Later, Mr. Quimby loses his job, and when he returns to work, it is to a position that makes him terribly unhappy. This leads to Ramona’s perpetual worrying, and her silent pleading with him via attempted thought control, “Daddy, please like your job. Please like your job.” Her concern as she listens from her bed to the timbre of her parents’ late night discussions in another room.
And don’t you remember that? Anxiety and fear over things of which you have no control? Only hearing patches of the conversation, parts of the story, and filling in the blanks with all your deepest fears? The dawning understanding that your family life is built on unsure foundations, as unsure as is anything I mean, and the terror of thinking it might all come apart?
That life isn’t fair is such a cliche, but in her stories, Cleary makes this idea endlessly interesting. Her situations are always sometimes unbearably true to life–the frustrations of trying to sew a pair of pants for a toy elephant, for example. Or the problems of a not-so-great teacher. Not a bad teacher, but just one generally lacking in appeal. There are teachers like this, and while in other novels, her student might discover her actual heart of gold, in Ramona, such teachers are trials to be borne. Because life is like that. Life is unfair. Sometimes your cat dies and you’ve got to bury it and you get blisters on your fingers.
But life is also rich in its smallest details—the squelch of boots in the mud, the appeal of a banana sticker, the sounds of kids riding bikes outside, a haircut that transforms you into a pixie for a while. That the foundation of family can be surer than you think. And that when you’re wonderful and blunderful, you’re a lot like life is. Which is something that’s good to know.
