Children's books All hail Philippa Pearce!
Alleva, Richard
CHILDREN'S BOOKS Lions, dinosaurs, & Jules Feiffer Richard Alleva If the Washington Square/ Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s-folksingers and coffeehouses and leotards,...
...Richard Alleva is Commonweal's "Culture Watch" columnist, and assistant head of children's services at Russell Library in Mid-dletown, Connecticut...
...A fast-food joint no more than a half-mile back...
...I learned them both at the age of five and have (perhaps) survived...
...X or young Miss Y, but that they didn't realize the degree to which they were right...
...wanted to get out and live with me"), false friends and true love, the realization of his innate inventiveness, the envy of his brother (who heads northwest to become a techno-capital-ist), a wife and children and, finally, reunion with his parents...
...The weakness that keeps Mr...
...Enter Fox, "with his smell of rage and envy and loneliness," who keeps whispering, "I can run faster than Dog...
...In some Pearce stories (and not just the ghost stories), the events are spectacular enough to satisfy the most action-craving kid: a bunch of boys place themselves in mortal danger by undertaking to pull down a giant oak without adult guidance...
...Sometimes the currents find more predictable channels and then we say, "Ah, realism...
...If, unfairly, you read this collection right after Pearce's, you may find it comparatively brittle...
...Rudy capitulates but Richard calls his father's bluff...
...Neither mom nor dad can help the nameless little girl whose plaint is I Lost My Bear (Morrow, $16,32 pp., preschoolers...
...And when that malevolence results in a theft and a little boy becoming unfairly implicated in that theft, it is only the insouciance and pariah status of Dirty Dick that keeps the whole situation from blowing up into a tragedy...
...All the adults know one another, all the kids play together, everybody thinks they know all there is to know about everybody else, until one day something happens that proves not that they were wrong about old Mr...
...Faster than the wind...
...The mothers and fathers...
...She herself is a great writer, and parents benight their children by not feeding them her masterpieces, Tom's Midnight Garden, A Dog So Small, The Way to Satin Shore, Lion at School, and this magnificent collection of stories...
...In trying to describe Coraline by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, $17.89,163 pp., ages 11 to early senility, which might be brought on prematurely by the shock of reading this book), I'm tempted to call it a cross between Through the Looking Glass and Invasion of the Body Snatch-ers...
...The writing is in the great British ghost story tradition, using delicate understatement and tidy realism to lower the reader's guard so that sheer terror can deliver several blows to the solar plexus...
...Which is no bluff...
...If Alice Longworth Roosevelt had had a penchant for folklore and fairies instead of Washington high society, she would have been Joan Aiken...
...Another collection by a veteran and well regarded British author is Shadows and Moonshine (David R. Godine, $18.95,171 pp., ages 10 and up) by Joan Aiken...
...After all, there are "trees and stuff...
...Read this masterpiece before your children do, then read it with them...
...There are only life and consciousness within life and currents of emotion flowing from one consciousness to another...
...In Pearce's fiction, it's never individual character that is unpredictable but rather what can happen when characters collide...
...This is the Feiffer book that, when read aloud, invites the most audience participation...
...Though Feiffer has written two novels for children-the excellent Man in the Ceiling, a portrait of the artist as a young goof, and a humorous allegory called A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears- he is really at his uncorseted best in his picture books...
...So, will kids get it...
...Feiffer followed through with another identity crisis, I'm Not Bobby (Hyperion, $16, 32 pp., all ages), in which a boy, unwilling to respond to his mother's call, imagines himself to be a lion, a dinosaur, or anything but who he actually is...
...She catches a glimpse of family happiness with the young farmers before returning to her misery...
...You kidding...
...Bark, George (HarperCollins, $14.89, 32 pp., preschoolers), commands a mother dog to her pup, who can't...
...I've shared this book many times with three-and four-year-olds, and their solidarity with the heroine is absolute, their relief at her ultimate victory cathartic...
...Bewilderment...
...Sometimes the currents find exceedingly odd furrows in which to flow and then we say, "Ah, a ghost story...
...Dog has lost an eye...
...Right again, but there's a catch...
...These are the sort of tales one might hear while hanging around an English village where everyone has cable television and cell phones and lives off the tourist trade, and yet where old presentiments of the supernatural have lingered...
...A joyous artist was turning himself into a scold...
...By this I don't mean to imply that Philippa Pearce is just a stepping stone to great literature...
...Alas, to leap from shark jaws to mountain lion claws to evaporating missiles launched by two-headed Martians, is to be stuck on a treadmill of danger and Raymond soon wants to get off...
...A small percentage of them will, the same percentage that will go on to read...
...But, alas, Dog is only almost flying through what looks like the Australian outback as rendered in Ron Brooks's marvelous pictures...
...Whereas those soliloquizing bohemians imploded, Bobby explodes into all the beings of his imagination...
...This year's publication of By the Side of the Road (Hyperion, $15.95, 65 pp., all ages) gives us the best thing Feiffer has ever done, either for adults or for children...
...In reaction to Nixon and Reagan, he appeared determined to punish all the usual right-wing suspects for all the usual left-wing reasons...
...This is the book that most resembles the author's early cartooning for adults, being essentially a monologue carried out in a series of panels...
...And so they run together, the author Margaret Wild tells us, "with Magpie clinging to his back...
...Well, is the story of Cain and Abel for children...
...Macy is henpecked by his wife and that the poor man won't be allowed to keep the big, yellowy-white blind dog that's wandered onto his property...
...A Pearce story typically takes place in the sort of English village or farmland familiar to us from Masterpiece Theater episodes...
...Over the last decade, however, Feiffer has been doing children's books and this has revived his generosity...
...They are still in the process of growing up, and their outbursts of rage and self-pity and ecstasy are trial runs toward adulthood...
...The seventies and eighties soured much of Feiffer's work...
...That's where most picture books would end...
...Misery...
...quack, oink, moo, and meow...
...you know, all those great writers all English teachers want them to read...
...An even grander event in children's literature: Greenwillow Books has published the collected tales of one of England's finest writers, Philippa Pearce, under the title Haunting and Familiar ($16.89, 392 pp., ages 10 and up...
...Abandoned in a wilderness, the bird hears a parting cry from her seducer: "She cannot tell if it is a scream of triumph or despair...
...Years pass...
...The book is filled with helpful photographs, but the fact that so many of them are of families similar to Jack's rather than his own implicitly darkens an already dark story, for not only was Jack's childhood ended by Hitler, most of the visual evidence of it was burned to ashes...
...So if your children lack a tart, tidy, and brisk grandmother with a fund of stories that instruct and delight, perch them on the knee of this book...
...Is this a story for children...
...This book, while certainly not for toddlers, is for anyone who can deal with it, thrill to it, absorb it...
...Feiffer shook his head at the glib Freudi-anizing of his bohemians, but how he loved their romantic swooniness and their need to grow through sheer perversity...
...That would be fair enough as far as the plot goes, in which the heroine battles a preternatural, soul-snatching force in an alternative, mirror-image world...
...Meanwhile (HarperCollins, $14.89, 32 pp., ages 4-8) takes its title from the word comic books use to shift the action from one locale to the next...
...Happen"-that's a trick word in fiction where what happens can take place inside a head instead of out in the world...
...A trip to a vet reveals that George's idiosyncrasies have more to do with his stomach than with his psyche...
...Indeed, Aiken is tart, tidy, and brisk...
...It's an instant American myth that begins with two brothers wrestling in the back seat of a car...
...Is it necessary to add that the illicit ride ends badly...
...From behind the steering wheel their father growls, "If you don't behave...
...Richard gets left by the side of the road...
...The characters in his new work have every right to be self-absorbed-they're kids...
...A meadow...
...Yet in the fictional shire of Philippa Pearce, spirits can be familiar even when horrifying us, while supposedly normal people can be goblins even when they keep their misdeeds as invisible as ghosts...
...The boy is so shocked that his eyes are reduced to dots in a ghostly pale, heart-shaped face: "I make them fight...
...Macy cannot...
...Magpie feels the wind streaming through her feathers and she rejoices...
...So Richard decides that this is it, he's going to live the rest of his life by the side of the road...
...But some Pearce stories will work only for one of those "extremely intelligent children (of all ages)" to whom Harold Bloom geared his recent anthology Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (Scribner...
...Jack Mandelbaum, who is now seventy-five and the founder of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, led a perfectly normal childhood in prewar Poland, and the fondly recalled incidents-the taste of "sweet fried pastry with pockets of jelly inside," the mischievous swims in Gdynia's harbor while the port police scold, the Christmas caroling alongside blithely accepting Catholic friends-concretely convey to young readers exactly what was obliterated by the Nazis...
...Fly, Dog, Fly...
...Leave Dog and come with me...
...His decision brings him celebrity and obloquy ("A thousand cars must have stopped to bother me...
...I'm gonna pull over right here, and you can wait by the side of the road till we come and get you...
...It's as if the petty compliments had to keep flowing for fear of what would be screamed if they stopped...
...In Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Camps by Andrea Warren (HarperCollins, $16.98,146 pp., ages 11 and up), all of the atrocious facts are certified by the sheer normalcy of the book's protagonist...
...a yuppie determined to uproot a haunted grove is put in his place (and not a happy place) by an indignant dryad...
...Magpie has lost a wing...
...George can only (only...
...The daughter, Val, spills her haul, runs away from a scolding, and winds up at a small farm where the kind owners feed her, bandage her skinned knee, and get her back home...
...The focus is on the target of the pecking, Zinkoff, who makes teachers roll their eyes up at the ceiling and classmates groan...
...The End...
...a jogger is pursued by the ghost of the brother he murdered...
...It won't inoculate them against the shocks that life holds in store, but emotional wisdom between the boards of any kind of book is too precious to miss...
...He runs so swiftly, it is almost as if he were flying...
...called me names, like 'selfish.' The kids...
...The breezy reader of Pearce's "The Great Blackberry Pick" will tell you that nothing happens in it: a father and his children go gathering berries in the country...
...But a careful reader will gradually realize that this is a portrait of an abused child who is desperately trying to placate her abuser but can't...
...The two adjectives signal the two halves of the book: "reality-based tales," and "supernatural tales...
...She's on a rollercoaster of emotion hurtling her up to an anguish worthy of Electra, then down to a depression against which Prozac could not prevail...
...Those soliloquies by preening beatniks, neurotic modern dancers, dazed college students, frustrated housewives, and middle-aged swingers weren't satires etched in acid but mockeries poeticized by affection...
...Buy this book for Halloween, 2003, gather the kids after the trick-or-treating is done, dim the lights, read in a hushed voice...
...In truth, for Pearce there is no division between natural and supernatural, at least not when she is at the top of her form...
...CHILDREN'S BOOKS Lions, dinosaurs, & Jules Feiffer Richard Alleva If the Washington Square/ Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s-folksingers and coffeehouses and leotards, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag and the Village Voice-seems as romantic to some of us as Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, blame Jules Feiffer's cartoons...
...Is the story of the Crucifixion for children...
...Besides, when the parents return at night and start arguing with each other "about whose fault it was that I was out there," Richard has an unhappy epiphany: "They get along fine except when it's about me...
...Actually not a bad place to wait if you're gonna wait by the side of the road...
...The naked incidents don't convey this but the author's arrangement of words does...
...In "What the Neighbors Did," everyone in the neighborhood knows that Mr...
...I will be your missing eye, and you will be my wings...
...They're right: he abandons the stray on the road where any car could run it over...
...It is typical of Aiken that when one of her heroes must communicate with the spirit of an ancestor dwelling in a wasteland, he has to take the "18.06 stopping train from Waterloo to Guild-ford" to do so...
...While never ceasing to be a first-rate novel, it is also a sort of anthropological study of the pecking order that kids arrange among themselves...
...Panic...
...Because of her love for Dog, Magpie survives, but the last image of hopefulness is bruised by the echo of Fox's scream...
...Filled with brilliant strokes of characterization, mini-sociology, domestic bliss, domestic hell, a grand exaltation of American individualism mitigated by a sense of family claims and mortality, this is a miniature epic that for once justifies the cliche encomium, "a book for all ages...
...And when Dirty Dick, the local junk dealer and all-around disgrace to humanity, takes the dog into his house, everybody knows that the mangy mutt and the mangy man are made for each other...
...Two interesting novels for the upper grades: Loser by Jerry Spinelli (HarperCollins, $15.89, 218 pp., ages 11 and up) is an amazing book...
...For instance, there's a constant repetition of phrases such as "you had to hand it to Dad/' "Dad was right about that, too," "Dad knew his map," etc...
...Macy henpecked and petless can curdle into resentment and the resentment can curdle into malevolence and the malevolence can be spewed at the very man who is free to do what Mr...
...Big deal...
...The destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis has by now become as perennial a feature of children's literature as of adults...
...By scribbling "meanwhile," young Raymond can escape from household chores into fantasies of pirates, cowboys, spaceships...
...So fiercely are Richard and Rudy entangled that they look like twin embryos in a womb...
...In Fox (Kane/Miller, $14.95, 32 pp., ages 6 and up), two animals come together in a friendship that we are bound to see as a marriage...
...The author regards Zinkoff never as a case suitable for treatment, but as a specialty number by God suitable for celebration...
Vol. 129 • November 2002 • No. 20
