#3 More About Tuck

I had a signing Saturday, and by the time it was done, I realized I had the flu. So to Warren and his younger sister, Meg, who were visiting New Hampshire from their home in Philadelphia: It was terrific meeting you (and your parents). I hope you like Evangeline and On the Farm, and thank you for buying them. But spray them with a strong disinfectant and put on your Hazmat masks before you touch them again. Don't hate me. I didn't know until it was too late.

Back to Tuck. Okay: The language is the life of the novel. We know that now. But it isn't only Natalie Babbitt's language that gives Tuck Everlasting its numinous quality. (Yes! Numinous!)
It's also the structure of the book, its architecture. The Prologue is one of my favorite short passages in all of literature. Not only does this little masterpiece introduce us to the image upon which the rest of the book revolves, the wheel, but through its precise use of language (and by such features as invoking the number three) it becomes the equivalent of those magical four words once upon a time. The Epilogue brings us back to where the narrative starts -- on the road to Treegap. The same road but changed, too, through the passage of time. By leaving us where we be began, the book itself becomes a circle, a wheel. To me, this is brilliant writing; the structure of the book, just like its language, is telling a story.

Once upon a time. A fairy tale. It's not a revelation to say that children know that fairy tales, real fairy tales, not the bowdlerized Disney versions that most children today grow up with, contain truths about their psychological, moral, even spiritual development. They can't articulate these, of course, nor should they, but only the most reductive of reductionisits would say that the tales are simply entertaining narratives. The dilemmas presented in fairy tales are our dilemmas. Am I loved? Am I good? How can I be good if I have "bad" thoughts and feelings? In Tuck Everlasting, essentially a fairy tale, Natalie Babbitt takes on the biggest dilemma, the cold, hard fact of death. In fact, by the end of the book, we understand that Winnie herself has died. Yikes! For young kids?

But here's what I love so much about the book. Babbitt presents this dilemma not by setting up a supposedly realisitic narrative of the O-dear-Mother-is dying-of-leukemia type, (adults in the children's publishing seem to love these books, by the way) but instead engages the child's imagination in exactly the way that fairy tales do so that she (the child) can interpret the book's meaning(s) in any way she chooses. Another way of saying this is that Babbitt allows the child the freedom to plant one foot in her objective reality while keeping the other firmly planted in her imagination. To my way of thinking, this shows an extraordinary understanding of children and a hard-to-find respect for childhood. It's not too much to say that it is even a powerful act of love.

And this is what all of our writing and publishing for children should be. Not about our own talents. Not about our own desires to feel literary. Not about making money. But about our love of children and our responsibility to nurture, understand and respect the world in which they live, which is not our world, but one in which, for example, the fountain of youth may be a necessary possibility.

#2 Homage to Tuck: Part 1

Barbara read the first post and told me it was too coy and to stop trying to be so "cute." She's right, of course, but that doesn't mean I have to start speaking to her again, does it? We all need our critics, but possibly not one who yells "yeck!" from the other room.

I'm often asked -- by kids, by parents, by teachers, by my writing students -- what my favorite kids' book is. It's an impossible question, really, and one which needs clarification. YA? Picture book? Middle grade novel? When it comes to the last in that harmonious trio, I love the Roald Dahl books. I love Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga, especially the first three in the series. And I love many of the classics: The Secret Garden, Pippi Longstocking. Like kids, I love any book that makes me laugh out loud. (More on that later.) But if I had to choose just one, painful as it is, there's no question. Tuck Everlasting.

In an NPR interview a couple of years ago, I heard Cynthia Ozick say that the life of a novel is in its language, by which I think she might mean that the language of the novel delivers more than the story's content, its information. The choice of vocabulary, sentence structure, sentence length and variety, syntax, punctuation, even something as mechanical as paragraph breaks or as seemingly perfunctory as punctuation -- all of these combine in some ultimately mysterious way to tell their own story. Its when this story, the story of the language, pulses through the veins of the actual narrative that a book begins to stand and breathe on its own. To my way of thinking, Natalie Babbitt accomplishes near perfection in this regard. Here's a very specific example. The first two sentences of Chapter 1.

"The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a heard of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed. It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of bee-hung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow."

That second sentence, the one describing the road, is the road. The sentence itself wanders, sways and ambles. And not only through its loose, meandering structure. The road didn't just sway it swayed off and up. It didn't just amble down, it ambled down again. Not sideways but sidewise. The vowels and consonants are working, too. Curves and easy angles. Fringes of bee-hung clover. The sentence is telling its own story, and nearly mesmerizes us, or at least me, in so doing.

If you're interested in this idea, you might also take a look at Feed, by Tobin Anderson. What Jamie Saw by Carolyn Coman. The Hanged Man by Francesca Lia Block. Very different from each other and very different from Tuck, but each, in its own way, seamlessly integrating the story of the language and the story of the narrative.

There's plenty more to say about Tuck, but for now, I'd better get back to my own work (he said, coyly).

Later.

David

#1

O dear! Now that I've wasted an entire morning figuring out how to get this going, pestering friends and in general, making a nuisance of myself, I find . . . well, I find that I have nothing much to say. It's humiliating, really. Kind of like a blind date, only worse because I set it up myself. After all, no one asked me to . . . er . . . blog, a verb, by the way, I thought I'd never use and at which the school marm in me clucks her tongue. Still, there may be those moments, in the distant future, when I might have an insight which could be interesting to someone who is perhaps interested in writing for kids.

Well, yes. But the truth is that it's more likely to become the forum for my many crackpot notions on that topic. My wife says I shouldn't do it. "You're not discrete," she says. "You're sure to make somebody mad." She's right. But I hope not.

Okay, friends, I've taken the plunge. I'll be back in a day or two with more substance. Possibly. Maybe not. Now though, I want to do something useful. Like walk the dog.