#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.