Magic Treehouse and Corduroy

After an onslaught of lovely visitors, our family has returned to the chaos of routine domestic living, which means I get access to the computer in the evenings after the kids are asleep. I much prefer the nightly conversation that occurs when the visitors are around, but writing something on the blog has its own charms.

Maria and Henry and I have been reading the Magic Tree House series together, and it excites the kids in equal proportion to boring me. We have made it through three books (there are something like 35 in the series), and I can’t help but wonder if some of my fifth grade story manuscripts were stolen in order to write these things.

It is my understanding that these books are very popular in the elementary school curriculum, which is great, because any time “books” and “popular” are pitted together, it probably means something good is happening. In the case of the Magical Treehouse books, the good is found in the way the sentences allow young readers to quickly understand them (which is also the bad). They are also good because they are short and swift. Nevertheless, I have two major misgivings about the series that I try to will quickly describe:

1. “Books are Magical!!!”: The premise is that a brother and sister find an abandoned treehouse full of books, and they discover that if you open one of the books and wish that you could go to the place the book is describing, you will actually go there and have some sort of adventure. I suppose the lesson is that books are full of adventures if a child decides to just open them up and read. I agree with the statement but I don’t quite like the application: the way the magical books in the treehouse work is more like the way a videogame functions, interactive in a “choose-your-own-adventure” way. The virtue of books is not that they “take” you places but that you “go” somewhere (you meet halfway, if that makes sense). Books ask you to leave your senses behind because they will often limit the way your mind creates the sensory reality of the words arranged on the page. Books are not videogames, nor are they movies. A good children’s book allows you to mentally enter a world of a writer’s and reader’s dual creation, and the appeal is less from the dinosaurs that you see or the intricacies of the moat around the castle, but rather the emotional and moral situations that those created worlds allow you to experience.
2. “Don’t worry, it won’t affect your ‘outside’ life”: Another premise in these books is that after the brother and sister travel to their foreign land and have an adventure, they return to their Pennsylvania town, where everything is the same as when they left it, and no time is elapsed. I hate this gimmick, and I also think it is dishonest. If you want to make a point about books and adventures and reading, then why would the world you inhabit never change? One of the primary experiences of reading a book is the time lapse—time does not stand still but it takes on a strange new movement that can only be gauged by the engrossing power of the book. Books take time, and a reader has to negotiate that in important ways. Not only do books take time, but they take and give life. After having read your book, if the world you return to is not altered in some way, either by your own perception or by the regular progress of time, you read a crappy book. Isn’t the worst insult for a book to be that you read it and then when about the rest of your day or life as if it never happened? The progress of time and the movement of space is the absolute of any narrative, and when it is ignored, nothing is at stake, and the book rings hollow.

Last night, after having finished Magic Treehouse #3, “Mummies in the Morning,” the three of us returned to the greener pastures of our older stories, and we ended up reading the two Corduroy books. The Corduroy books are odd among children books: they both involve being locked in a commercial space overnight, a thing of childhood daydreams or nightmares, and they both involve a multicultural cast that emphasizes the books’ urban setting. The tension and isolation of the city remain the central concerns of Corduroy, who often finds himself alone among a myriad of urban creations, whether it is in a mall or Laundromat. Corduroy gets into his overnight predicaments by searching for something fairly innocuous, like a button or a pocket, and in his search, he imagines each new item as a natural entity from beyond the urban experience (“I’ve always wanted to climb a mountain” for an escalator, or “I’ve always wanted to enter a cave” for a bag of laundry). The result is an amazingly acute representation of urban isolation and fragmented living (Ezra Pound said the city is like a collection of nouns without verbal relations, which is most perfect statement about the city that I have ever come across).

I should stop ruining Corduroy with my points about its political concerns, but let me just emphasize how charming the Corduroy books are. The kids and I were more enchanted by the two adventures of Corduroy procuring small accessories for his green overalls then we were by the three adventures of visiting dinosaurs, castles, and mummies in a spinning treehouse. I could write a term paper about Corduroy, which I might try to do sometime, but in the meantime, let me just use it as the perfect example of two points: 1. books are magical, and 2. they allow you to re-envision the world in which you live.