PBS's 'New York'
Wren, Celia
CHILDREN'S BOOKS Revivals & new arrivals Daria Donnelly To the litany of persons who shaped this century, let me add the name E[dith] Nes-bit, whose stories precipitated a still evolving...
...Like her, Eager's touch is light, his morals earned, his portraits true, his tone wry...
...Or, as Jorge Luis Borges once said, "when we write about the fantastic, we are trying to get away from time and to write about everlasting things...
...You can guess whose books Eager's children recur to most often...
...Before Nesbit, such literature fell into two types: either the entire action took place in an exotic or fantastical setting, or the child character (Dorothy or Alice) traveled from this world into a fantastical one...
...His ambition—to make theological truths palpable and beautiful for children—was not Nesbit's, but he borrowed her unpredictable magic, her images, and her sibling dynamics to his great benefit...
...His children, like hers, are avid readers, and they shape and analyze their adventures with the help of what they have read...
...The story is simple...
...A playwright and lyricist, Eager wrote books which are packed with word play and literary allusion, and are a pleasure to read aloud...
...Her prayers were efficacious...
...He is also, in my view, the most interesting religious thinker for young children since C. S. Lewis...
...Eager is Nesbit after John Dewey, the automobile, Fred Astaire, and the cocktail hour...
...An enraged and sorrowful Commonweal W November 5,1999...
...And each day, corresponding to each chapter, he reluctantly grants them a wish that results in a new adventure in their very neighborhood...
...The most Nesbit-like writer of the moment is British picture-book maker John Burn-ingham...
...Magic is the handmaiden of marvel, and marvel the mother of awe and praise...
...Not wanting to be seen, God puts everyone in the world to sleep, and begins the tour...
...Upon waking, God decides to visit the planet and see how things are going...
...Even Nesbit's tone heralded change...
...E.T...
...Burningham's latest book is Whad-dayamean (Crown, $18.95), a parable about the urgent necessity of changing the way we live, think, and teach...
...Having taken millions of years to create this earthly paradise, God rests...
...She once wrote: "When I was a child I used to pray fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought, felt, and suffered then...
...CHILDREN'S BOOKS Revivals & new arrivals Daria Donnelly To the litany of persons who shaped this century, let me add the name E[dith] Nes-bit, whose stories precipitated a still evolving revolution in wonder...
...Lewis was a great admirer...
...She spoke directly and archly to her young readers, reminding them of novelistic conventions even as she overthrew them...
...In America, Nesbit's most ardent follower was Edward Eager, whose hilarious canon (1954-62)—Half Magic, Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, Seven-Day Magic—has just been reprinted (Odyssey/Harcourt Brace, $6, paper, ages 8 and up...
...Like Nesbit, Eager has children stumbling onto magic and then, in episodic chapters, learning how to control it and use it wisely...
...actually looks like the Psammead...
...With her recently republished 1902 Five Children and It (Books of Wonder/Morrow, illus...
...Also new was the magic itself: comical, human, and wildly unpredictable rather than supernatural, dreadful, and weird...
...Paul O. Zelinsky, $22, 242 pp., ages 8 and up), E. Nesbit ushered in a new era of children's fantasy literature...
...And she was blessedly true to the boredom, embarrassment, pleasure, squabbling, vexation, and thrill of a childhood summer day...
...But in Five Children and It, a group of middle-class Edwardian children find a prehistoric, ill-tempered thing called a Psammead right in the gravel pit behind their house...
...Yet the likeness outstrips the difference...
...He too places tiny shadows in the background—financial instability, class conflict, loneliness—things that, in both authors' works, register just the right amount on children as they dawdle through summer and tackle their proximate troubles...
...Nesbit inspired the best magical storytellers of this century...
...Startled to find two wakeful children, God invites them along on what proves to be the terrible discovery of our despoiled environment and hungry world...
...Locating the fantastical in everyday life was Nesbit's great and enduring innovation...
...That his books touch the eternal by means of the fantastical should not surprise us...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
