#4 Sideways Stories from the Wayside School

Generally, our household is a healthy one, which means that our medical supplies are limited to the basics: bandaids and aspirin. But on Wednesday evening, my fever seemed to be climbing and so Barbara drove to our friends, Wendy and Scott Hanwell --the parents of young twins --to borrow theirs. We were both puzzled by the instrument she returned with; it measured only to 100 degrees Farenheit. There was space for the mercury to rise higher, but no numbers registering the actual temperature. Weird. Only later did we discover that it was a basal thermometer.

For the uninitiated, basal thermometers are used to alert women to the actual day they are ovulating.

Apparently, I was.

I wanted to take a moment to mention another book I love: Louis Sachar's Sideways Stories from the Wayside School. Completely different from Tuck, but brilliant in its own right. And yet, at a conference a few years ago, I heard a doyenne of children’s literature announce to an audience of well over eight hundred that until Sachar wrote Holes, it was thought he was “capable of writing only B fiction.” Yikes!

Let's put aside for the moment the incredible arrogance (not to mention just plain bad manners of saying such a thing publicly) and ask ourselves why the Wayside School and its inhabitants were dissed so out-of-hand. Is it, one suspects, simply because the book is funny? If so, it seems terribly short-sighted since the surreal humor in the book, as well as its masterful structure, cloak, among other things, astute observations about human nature and the wonderfully subversive relationship between children and adults. But even if this were not so, isn't it enough that the book makes us laugh? What about humor for its own sake? Good heavens! Must a book always teach children something? What about the sheer value of story? Somebody! Tell me! When did we get to be such fuddy-duddies?

The truth is that kids still love the Wayside School nearly thirty years after it was published. Hooray for them! I can't help but wonder if that will be true of the A fiction of which the aforementioned doyenne seems to approve.

More on this next time. Still foolish . . . er . . . I mean fluish.