#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