Almost any mother or father will tell you that one of the great pleasures of parenthood is rediscovering the thrill of kids’ books. Many are delightful as straightforward works of art, exemplars of acid-trip creativity and emotional sensitivity; many provoke discussions with our children or reveal dimensions of their personalities we’d never quite known (they responded to that?); many shed light on our former selves (no wonder I responded to that), or allow us to feast on nostalgia or give us an excuse, let’s face it, to use funny voices, make strange sounds, even cry.
In his introduction to Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, Bruce Handy includes himself in the ranks of those who have luxuriated in kids’ books as a big person, and he gratefully acknowledges the many others who have done so before him and written about the subject so well. (Among them: Alison Lurie and John Updike.)
Handy does not offer a kind of string theory for the universe of children’s classics, trying to reconcile competing visions of what motivated their authors or what makes kids respond to them. If you ever wondered, for example, why a surprising number of children’s authors are childless, do not look for theories here.
Instead, Wild Things is relaxed, discursive and personal, a survey course centering on the writers to whom Handy especially responds. He analyzes their best works; provides cultural, historical and personal context; and salts his research with a grain or two of developmental psychology.
The result is very pleasing to read, when it isn’t frustratingly glib, which I regret to report is too often. Why the members of Handy’s brain trust didn’t tell him to cut out the excessive antics, I have no clue. Maybe they are suckers for all things Handy, as I tend to be. (I’ve enjoyed him since his days at Spy magazine; he now writes for Vanity Fair.) Whatever the reason, they clearly hadn’t the heart to tell him to kill some darlings in this particular nursery, and the book suffers for it.
But let’s first start with what makes Wild Things a breezy, easy appreciation. Handy quotes liberally from each book he admires, and he curates those passages beautifully, allowing readers both literary pleasure and a kind of time travel. His analyses are affectionate and often eccentric. He’s got a magpie’s eye for odd and shiny details. (I had no clue that Beatrix Potter was so devoted to anatomical verisimilitude that she boiled dead animals and then reassembled their skeletons.)
His chapter about Theodor Geisel—a.k.a. Dr. Seuss—is a total charmer. Handy describes the author’s books as a blend of “imagination, humor, rhyme, rigor, silliness, aggression and chaos theory”, which is as efficient and accurate a blurb as I’ve ever read, and he finds fanciful ways to show the true nature of Geisel’s genius. You may or may not know, for instance, that The Cat in the Hat was composed using just 222 different words, because Geisel was under orders from his publisher to draw from a prescribed vocabulary for beginning readers. But Handy takes the time to list those 222 words in alphabetical order, making it clear just what a feat it was. “You try finding a story in this,” he writes.
One of Handy’s strengths is that his brain tends toward unlikely analogies. But as the book goes on, these analogies increasingly become a tiresome nervous tic. After making a series of clever observations, Handy can’t resist capping them with a silly hat.
The Little House books, with all their hunting and hammering, “often read like 19th-century equivalents of This Old House or Guns and Ammo”. The Butter Battle Book, the Dr. Seuss parable about the nuclear arms race, “reads as if the Sneetches had invaded Dr. Strangelove’s war room”. Ramona’s appearance in her creator Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins is “as passing comic relief, a nursery-school version of the town drunk in a John Ford movie.”
I don’t want to imply that Handy isn’t funny. Part of the reason I picked up Wild Things is because he is. It’s just that someone in the editorial process was obviously afraid of the delete key. This charming confession about the Little House series seriously made me laugh: “From the denatured vantage point of 21st-century urban fatherhood, where bantering with the super as he fixes your toilet counts as manly self-sufficiency, Pa cuts an intimidating figure.”
Seems a natural reaction, as Handy notes, to reading about a man who not only builds his own home but makes his own bullets.
It is when Handy shows his own weaknesses that he often stands on the firmest ground. He concludes Wild Things on a melancholy note, admitting that his foray into children’s literature allowed him more than a simple chance to reencounter the favorite books of his youth. It allowed him the chance to hold close his children’s younger selves. “By one measure, I suppose,” he writes, “you are holding in your hands a work of sublimated grief.”