Jam on Prose (The Frances books)

This is an excerpt from Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances, a wonderful children’s book in its own right but an especially important picture book from my childhood.

Albert took two napkins from his lunch box.

He spread the other one on his desk like a tablecloth.

He arranged his lunch neatly on the napkin.

With his spoon he cracked the shell of the hard-boiled egg.

He peeled away the shell and bit off the end of the egg.

He sprinkled salt on the yolk and set the egg down again.

He unscrewed his thermos-bottle cup and filled it with milk.

Then he was ready to eat his lunch.

He took a bit of sandwich, a bite of pickle,

a bite of hard-boiled egg, and a drink of milk.

Then he sprinkled more salt on the egg and went around again.

Albert made the sandwich, the pickle,

the egg, and the milk come out even.

The passage goes on for several more lines in this vein. I am not sure if Russell Hoban meant for it to read like poetry, but it is written with those end-lines how I have transcribed them, and the effect is much like a sestina, what with the deliberate meter and the repetition of “egg,” “milk,” and “pickle” to end different lines. The prose is hypnotizing in its incantatory sound and in each sentence’s parallel construction, like a liturgical utterance or something. Indeed, the words that make up each sentence “come out even.” But what is really striking is its sonority: you could read this passage in a poetry reading and I guarantee the audience will be rapt with attention.

Now consider this excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

He hung the hat on a peg by the door among slickers and blanketcoats and odd pieces of tack and came to the stove and got his coffee and took it to the table. She opened the oven and drew out a pan of sweetrolls she’d made and put one on a plate and brought it over and set it in front of him together with a knife for the butter and she touched the back of his head with her hand before she returned to the stove.

McCarthy’s prose is like Hoban’s with the punctuation removed, and the difference in effect is that the McCarthy has a ghost-like quality to it in which things are done in detail but without end stops: each activity blurs into the next, and the small gestures seem to have strange depth beyond their simple performance. The signficance of each activity is never retained, though, because it is too quickly transformed into the next act.

My point in pitting these two passages together is to show both their similarities and subtle distinctions. Both include prose that enchants with its evocation of details in a kind of cosmic ordering of everyday acts, but that order has a completely different meaning despite the stylistic parallels. The significance of the prose describing Albert eating his lunch is that an incredible enjoyment can come from meticulousness, whereas the significance of the prose in All the Pretty Horses suggests that meticulousness is often a marker of great sorrow. Both have the emphasis on sequence and chronology but differ in the way that chronology is lived.

Hoban’s prose is good in all of his Frances books, and his deliberate style makes for great bedtime reading, as my brothers and sisters will attest. Several years ago, my mom and dad made an audio recording of two of the Frances books, and my dad reads the bulk of each book slowly and clearly, much like how Albert eats his lunch. The result is bittersweet: he reads with the joy of systematic thinking that Albert has with systematic eating, but his voice evokes such sorrow in me because since he has been gone, my life has been much more like the McCarthy passage, with one activity blurring into the next in an attempt to grip an unknown grief, than the Hoban passage, of which Dad’s life was a great model. I strive to make it all “come out even,” but I end up needing too many “ands” and neglecting the periods.

At the end of Bread and Jam for Frances, Albert makes another appearance, this time as the observer of Frances’s new diverse lunch. He responds to her description of her lunch with what I consider immortal words:

“That’s a good lunch,” said Albert.

“I think it’s nice that there are all different kinds of lunches and breakfasts and dinners and snacks. I think eating is nice.”

I often have that sentiment, as simple as it is, but what I really find lovely about it is that when my dad says it on the audio recording, it sounds like he really means it. I have the feeling that Albert and my dad are kindred spirits when it comes to the simple enjoyment of the diversity of lunches. I think that is nice.

Up

I won't deny that I am a contrarian when it comes to popular tastes, depending on the local context of popular. There was a time that I tried to dislike Pixar films because I was so swamped with adoration for the films that I thought were mediocre, like Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo. They are both great movies but not quite as good as the voices close by made them out to be, yet upon entering graduate school in Arizona, I noticed that ideological criticism reigned supreme, and Pixar (especially from its association with Disney) became a target of knuckleheads ready to point out the absence of women heroes, racial diversity, and conservativism. From that spirit, I began to defend Pixar, especially as The Incredibles first entered the scene, with its Ayn Rand-ish message (albeit more subtle) and traditional family values, favorite targets of the unenlightened. I am not totally opposed to ideological criticism, and I love to pull it out when in discussions about The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, both of which are kind of lame anyway so I don't feel too bad about it. I also have ideological criticisms of Beauty and the Beast in my contrarian bank, but the movie is so damn good that I prefer to leave them there.

Since the Incredibles, it seems that Pixar has been on a roll of rolling out movies that are so far superior to other films that I have considered making them course requirements. My personal feeling is that Pixar reached its peak with Ratatouille, which is a downright masterpiece, but the latest two films have been as close to a plateau as Mesa Verde. I am going to leave Wall E for another post because my friend Bryan (with a y not an i) needs to lay down his own critical apparatus to deflate it, but I saw Up last Saturday, so I can quickly comment on that. 

Having spent 20 dollars to take both kids to Up, I was either going to love it or hate it with an ardency that only comes when I spend more than 10 dollars on something. But because I got my 20 dollars worth in the first 20 minutes of the film, I could happily enjoy the rest of the movie without further reservations. In fact, the first 20 minutes were so moving that it took me the rest of the movie just to come down and shore up the tears of aesthetic joy. If Wall E is about romance, the kind that is so true that only robots could depict it (see my earlier comments on allegory), Up is about marriage, the kind that is so real that only a montage could depict it. This thematic movement is a nice trend--the next Pixar film, if all goes according to my plan, should be about childrearing. Up tried to approach that topic but was not as successful, principally because the film knew it was all about marriage and other topics weren't going to be dealt with as well. 

The film as a whole is good enough--it is funny and nice to look at, full of little moments that provide the vagus nerve with enough juice to get through the less-appealing action sequences. Here are two observations though: the kid in the movie, who has all the makings of one of those really annoying characters in animation that says crazy things and mugs endlessly, has a personality that reveals the charms beneath the annoyance. Not once did I really want him off the screen, which was an unexpected reaction for me. The other observation is that each character seems to have weight. One of the problems with computer animation is that it creates a kind of weightlessness that removes the stakes from the action, but the characters and objects in this movie, with the exception of the exotic bird Kevin, feel like gravity actually pulls them. After all, this movie is all about weight and weightlessness, which is why the child needed to be overweight: the metonymic relationship between actual weight and "weight" as in burdens are always collapsing to make the action and images more poignant. The story constantly turns on how much weight both the balloons and Carl Frederickson can carry, and the only way to move the house was to balance human weight and the upward force of the balloons. The symbolism is at times a bit heavy-handed, but that is necessary, in my opinion, for an adolescent's understanding of the literary weight of the film, so to speak. The movie's title not only refers to the possibilities of weightlessness but also nicely puts two letters together that look an awful lot like the characters: Carl and Elie in "U" form (two lines joined at the bottom), and Russell as a small "p." This might look silly, but the textual appearance of the word frequently appeared in the visuals, whether intentionally or not, and I kept thinking about it while watching. The movie is that good. 

I don't want to make the movie sound like a chore though--it's not. In fact, Pixar's latest films have understood the enchanting power of narrative as well as most children's books, and it makes them much better for it. A good children's book tells a story with just enough words to move the pictures along, and it doesn't waste time with self-conscious jokes and metanarrative winks."Where the Wild Things Are" is a good example of this: the book's white space (where the words are to go) is gradually overtaken by the imaginative illustrations to the point where the words disappear completely. Only when Max feels like exiting his own imagination do the words start to reappear and the white space returns. I have never heard anybody adequately explain why that book is so powerful, but I would suggest that it is precisely because it is about imagination itself, while it allows the reader to cognitively do what Max is doing, with few words to muddle it up. This, it seems to me, is part of the Pixar formula, or at least it has been for the latest three films. Now if only Dreamworks could start rethinking their brand of cool self-consciousness and allow their characters to shut up for a while, we might have more than one worthy computer-animated movie a year.  

The Graveyard Book

Upon finishing The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle when I was just a llad (sic), I decided I was going to read every book that ever won the Newberry Medal. I don’t exactly remember why I decided this. Maybe it was because I was so impressed with Voyages that I thought it represented the quality of those awards—if Voyages of Doctor Doolittle won it, the award had to mean something. The Newberry Award seems to be the only major literary award (or artistic award) that I still trust: Johnny Tremain, The Westing Game, The View from Saturday, Lincoln: A Photobiography, The Giver, Julie of the Wolves—the list really is pretty amazing. My goal to read all of them was never completed, but I did read a lot of them, and I only stopped after the “donkey” (a secret book-giver on Christmas Eve) gave me Maniac Magee, and my brother made such relentless fun of the book’s title and cover that I decided to give up my quest and not read for a while. This is why Mark, as a brother, has always been overrated: for each special hiking trip he took Paul on, he destroyed at least one artistic and intellectual dream of mine. I should at least give him credit, though, for abusing me away from Broadway shows and teddy bears. So maybe he is not overrated.

Earlier this year, when I heard about the newest Newberry Award winner The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, my childhood interest in the Newberry inexplicably returned. When a fantasy/scifi book wins the Newberry, it usually means that there is going to be a lot of thoughtful prose to accompany the mythologies and narrative intrigue that usually characterize the genre. The Newberry people, like most award givers, like to have their literary pretensions satisfied, and if a fantasy novel can do that, all the better. At any rate, I decided to read The Graveyard Book as soon as I had the chance.

If my regular readers have not noticed already, I refuse summary as resolutely as I refuse raisins, so I will not summarize the book’s plot other than to say it is about a kid who is raised by ghosts that inhabit a local graveyard. As narratively magical as they come, the novel begins with a deep menace that quickly dissolves to wonder, and then to delight. Gaiman, whose imagination seems to be inherited from Roald Dahl, has the gift of enchantment, which is no small feat: rare are the books that can whip up a world that seems to be familiar in terms of its affective possibilities, observations, and emotions but foreign in its history, geography, mythology.

I suspect the Harry Potter series achieves something similar, although I have not read the series other than the first book (I am waiting for Maria to be about the right age for us to read them together). I am told that the Twilight series also does this, but those who have told me that are wrong because I read the first 30 pages of the first book and it was utterly foreign in all the things that should be familiar, like emotions, observations, relationships, compassion, and quality. The reason, though, that I bring up these two series is because they popped in my mind while I was reading The Graveyard Book as comparisons. Thinking about them, and their popularity, brought into relief the excellence of Gaiman’s story in a genre that is already oversaturated by vampires, ghosts, and schoolyard legends. But what is really great is Gaiman’s prose—precise, fun, and light.

For example, in a fantastic chapter called “Danse Macabre,” Bod, the protagonist, stumbles upon an ancient tradition in which the dead dance with the living in a public square during a late autumn blossoming. As he approaches the scene, he sees a young mother holding a baby “swaying her head to the music”:

“How long does the music go on for?” Bod asked her, but she said nothing, just swayed and smiled. Bod did not think she smiled much normally. And only when he was certain that she had not heard him, that he had Faded, or was simply not someone she cared enough about to listen to she said, “Blimmin ‘eck. It’s like Christmases.” She said it like a woman in a dream, as if she was seeing herself from the outside. In the same not-really-there tone of voice, she said, “Puts me in mind of me Gran’s sister, Aunt Clara. The night before Christmas we’d go to her, after me Gran passed away, and she’d play music on her old piano, and she’d sing, sometimes, and we’d eat chocolates and nuts and I can’t remember any of the songs she sung. But that music, it’s like all of them songs playing at once.”

The passage is emblematic for some of the larger effects that the book has on the reader. The woman with the baby is clearly in a dreamwalk of some sort, where things utterly strange take on a familiarity in which past experiences and emotions are remembered, only as if they have been amplified (“like all of them songs playing at once”). Freud would probably call this the uncanny, but the response isn’t abject fear but rather a dreamy nostalgia. The book has the same effect: The reader knows as little as Bod does about every given situation, and as layers are uncovered, there is still a sheen of mystery that is never quite stripped away. The enchanting nature of prose narrative comes from the sense of not-really-knowing, where one almost has the answer but cannot quite connect everything. This is why the big reveal at the end of some narratives is never quite as satisfying as its anticipation: the slightly unknown is much more a part of our lived existence (especially in childhood) and hence has a more powerful effect on us. As readers, we “sway” to the music of Gaiman’s prose, wondering what to make of the things we are witnessing, only to remind ourselves of the things that great art can conjure, whether it is singing Christmas songs at Aunt Clara’s in memory or a wholly new experience tweaked with familiarity: “like all of them songs playing at once.”

The greatest of children’s books can create this sense, and I wouldn’t hesitate to put The Graveyard Book in that category. I advise all those within hearing distance to read it with their eight-year-old (or above) as soon as possible.

P.S. Don’t think the book is not scary—it is. But it is scary in the way things should be scary, to heighten the senses instead of to dull them. Let it scare you—you will be better for it. I condone a good scare, especially for children.

I should add that you know a story is subpar when it all hinges on whether every moment is “connected” at the end: the movies often make use of this cheap device, and the result is a forgettable movie. The Graveyard Book leaves much of its mystery intact, which is the way I prefer things.

Voyages of Dr. Doolittle

I have started this blog in anticipation of keeping my occasional writings on adolescent literature, as the title suggests. I url'd the blog "DoolittleVoyages" because that book, the second book in the Doolittle book if my memory serves me correctly, did more for developing my early love for imaginative literature than any other book. I will be starting by posting most of the reviews I have already written on my other blog to this one. I'll try to indicate dates of writing in the title heading. Let us begin.