Childhood is Calling, and It Wants Its Innocence Back

Thinking about sci-fi put me in a going-back-to-my-reading-roots mood, so I perused my bookshelves for a childhood classic to re-read. The lucky winner was Roald Dahl's Danny: The Champion of the World, and what a fine choice it ended up being. It's a nut just waiting to be cracked by some sharp insights about class tensions, aristocratic inconsequentiality, economic influences on childhood, and the transferral of masculinity between generations. What made me sit up straight and take a deep breath though, was the difference between my reading of Danny umpteen years ago and my reading of it yesterday.

A quick version of the story: Danny's mother died when he was very young, and now he lives with his father, William, who is a mechanic. Their shop lies a bit out of town, and they house themselves in an old gypsy caravan behind the shop. Danny loves his father, for all the surprising and exciting things William says and does. One of the most surprising turns out to be pheasant poaching in Mr. Victor Hazell's woods six miles up the road. Danny suggests a scheme for the ultimate pheasant-poaching experience, they try it out, bag 120 drugged-up pheasants, deliver them to the Vicar's wife, the sleeping pills wear off the next morning and pandemonium ensues. Cue hilarity and a riotous sendup of the heavy-jowled, red-faced Mr. Hazell. (That would be the class tensions coming into play.)

I only had the vaguest recollections of this plot when I pulled Danny off the bookshelves this last time. A few pages in, I had the most comfortable feeling, as though this was a space which I knew fairly well, and wouldn't need to work too hard to reacquaint myself with. It was a bit like finding an old, lost sweater and discovering it's still worn into the shape of your shoulders. Except that a few pages further, that sweater was starting to itch and pull and grow tight in all the wrong places.

That 'wrong' feeling? It all boiled down to Dahl's characterization of William. Danny is our narrator, so we see William only through the eyes of an adoring, idolizing son. When I first read Danny, I was probably pretty close to his age in the book. I identified with him, idolized his father along with him, wished I had crazy illegal pheasanty adventures with him. Perhaps I give my younger self too much credit, but I do recall knowing that money was an issue for Danny and William. They clearly didn't have much of it, and living outside of town was a clear indicator of that for a little girl living in a tiny German village with farming still struggling to make it all around the village. Again, perhaps my hindsight is a bit misty.

I know I had no critical thoughts about William, though. How can I know, after all these years? Well, I can't really, but what I can do is extrapolate from those initial cozy feelings from yesterday that I already mentioned. Five pages in, I was simply enjoying an escapist romp in 19early-something-ish England. As soon as William started in on his poaching, though, those feelings evaporated, replaced by the slow settle of heavy responsibility and adult concerns. See, William is rather upfront about the dangers of poaching: The pheasant keepers carry guns and will shoot at anything without feathers that moves. And yet, he continues to poach.

How?

How could a single father justify putting himself in mortal danger, with no care for his son's welfare should he be shot and unable to work, or even killed? Obviously, I ask this question with a very post-2000 attitude about the responsibilities of parents, and particularly with contemporary ideas about the necessity of gender-equal distribution of those responsibilities. In Danny's days, having a caring father who not only earned the dough, but also baked it, and told bed-time stories and walked his son to school every day, would have been something else. Indeed, if Danny wasn't the Champion of the World, at least he would be the Champion of Sons with Concerned, Involved Fathers. If that was all William was, I wouldn't be having this odd now-vs-then discrepancy as per my view of him.

Danny's narration gives us insights into William's character, as well as his activities. This bit just blew my mind:

Danny has discovered that his headmaster, Mr. Snoddy, drinks gin all day. He decides to keep the secret, save for telling one person.
"The only person I told was my father, and when he heard it, he said, "I don't blame him one bit. If I was unlucky enough to be married to Mrs. Snoddy, I would drink something a bit stronger than gin."
"What would you drink, dad?"
"Poison," he said. "She's a frightful woman."

Whoa. You want to talk about sending negative signals to children about women, marriage, relationships, and appropriate responses to unfortunate circumstances?

But then I'm stuck asking, What would I have kids read? Once they get out of picture books, and before I'm ready to loose them into Updike, there must be a middle ground. By middle ground, I mean thematically and topically, something that trades some childhood concerns ("But I don't like sharing!) for adult ones ("But I don't like sharing, so I'm going to do destructive things and act like a child!). Thinking through that last explication of this ambiguous middle ground, I've come to a new conclusion about it. It's not that children and adults require different topics or themes, but rather that children and adults can generally handle different levels of sophistication in treating the same topics and themes.

So applied to Danny, that means I'm not going to take Dahl to task for setting up this possibly misogynistic and irresponsible father as the model all fathers should follow if they would like to be "sparky," not "stodgy"! Rather, I will take to task guardians, parents, librarians, teachers who have kids read this book without providing other examples and models to follow.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean we should live in a crazy PC-world in which every possible viewpoint is represented as equally valid. The resulting who-can-be-more-liberal-and-accepting pissing contest gives me the shivers. What I do mean is that if I gave a kid Danny, I would do it with full awareness both of how I read it as a kid and how I read it now. I've had an extra 17ish years to gain some perspective on what types of people are out there in world. I would like to share some of that perspective with the (made-up, non-specific) kid reading Danny and loving William, just like I did at that age. Perhaps that sharing takes the form of another book, with different models of masculinity and fatherhood. Perhaps it is introducing the imaginary kid to lots of real people: fathers, brothers, policemen, baristas, teachers, friends, who are all different, and--more importantly--show those differences in their attitudes and behaviors.

The child who is sheltered, kept only with kids exactly her own age for the length of the school-day, then shuttled back home to spend time in exactly one family environment, observing one set of relationships and interactions is ill-prepared to understand William as a three-dimensional, and sometimes negative, character. That sheltered (made-up, non-specific) child simply has no basis for comparison.

So get those kids out in the world! Let them talk to strangers, at the coffeeshop or the library or the farmer's market! Give them more books than they can possibly read, and read those books yourself, and then talk about them! Make friends with the neighbor kids, but check out the neighbor adults and see if they're friendly and unthreatening too!

How else can a child in love with reading learn enough of the world for their emotional and judgemental faculties to keep pace with what they can, and therefore want, to read? Books can be a child's ticket to a whole new world. Don't adults have the responsibility of making sure that world is as rich and diverse and complete as possible?

Don't Genrify My Neighborhood!

The first books I can remember selecting for myself were cheap paperback versions of Dragonlance and Anne McCaffrey at the BX bookstore in Germany. As far as I recall (and we all know how murkily untrustworthy recollections can be), no one introduced me to them, told me what they were about, clued me in to their subgenre, non-literary status. Perhaps I just liked the pretty covers.

Thus began years of reading science fiction, exhaustively and--for monthlong stretches--exclusively. Sometime in college, I left science fiction behind, with few exceptions. I completely left fantasy and sword-and-sorcery to wither by the wayside. Somehow, the topics of books that had previously engulfed my mind just weren't relevant anymore, to my experiences as a woman, as a college student, as a seeker of meaning and direction for my life. Yet, the critic in me says, Hold up a moment! Science fiction and fantasy treats all those topics/themes/what-have-you's, and more! How can you simply decide it's not relevant?

I'll tell you how, or at least my half-congealed ideas of how. About the time I broke up with sci-fi, I found a new boy(girl)friend. Literature. Let me restate, making sure to emphasize the initial capital: Literature. And Literature was a jealous creature, that didn't want me going out for coffee with my ex. At those moments when I missed the delight with which I discovered new unabashedly nerdy authors, devoured descriptions of demonic meta-computers gone astray, at those moments, I reminded myself (subconsciously, of course) that I had traded all that in for a shiny new ride with reputable bucket seats and a whole host of upstanding folk ready to oo and ahh over it.

Perhaps that metaphor went a bit far. The point is, my interest in reading as something beyond escapism, beyond a hobby came together with my earnest search for a position in the world from which I could feel secure in who I was and what I was doing. And nothing provides a sense of security more easily than the codified institutional label of reputability. Literature is reputable and science ficiton is not. Therefore, since I must read, I cannot imagine not reading, I will read Literature, and it will give me all the social gratification of belonging to an intellectual (and in hindsight, elitist) group, as well as the individual gratification of running my eyes over words on a page, making sense of them, enlarging my knowledge and worldview and understanding of others without leaving my easy chair. I even found one of those 100-Greatest lists, and read through it like it was my job, highlighting with satisfaction every book I finished.

I won't deny still having that highlighting impulse today (the MA Reading List is a constant lure!), but I will claim to better understand that impulse. More importantly, I have consciously chosen to resist it, for reasons that have nothing to do with what's actually on the list and everything to do with what isn't.

You certainly won't find any science fiction on the list, but that's alright with me. I'm not losing sleep over sci-fi's lack of place in the academic canon. It would be oversimplifying to say that sci-fi is a more productive and interesting and lively enterprise because of that lack, but that's generally about half the idea I'm getting at. The other half consists of exploring why sci-fi, as a genre, has been relegated to subpar literary status. All my thoughts on this question have been heavily influenced by Samuel R. Delany's Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, which I'm currently reading.

The problem with sci-fi's low standings does not result from its particular generic characteristics, but rather from the fact that academics sincerely believe that it has particular generic characteristics. Certainly this is true of other types of books, from the picaresque to the art novel, but something about this belief is different. I agree with Delany's supposition that critics and general readers believe that sci-fi can be wholly circumscribed by its characteristics, and that circumscription constitutes the boundaries of all that defines sci-fi. It's the old problem of demonizing the Other: If we non-nerd kids can build a semantic wall around all that is sci-fi, then we can stand on this side (the right, reputable side) of that wall, and make all our critical pronouncements from solidly socially acceptable ground. Most critical questions being asked of sci-fi assume the presence of the wall as an unassailable--in fact, necessary--condition of sci-fi. But it's not.

Just as poetry borrows from prose, and novels can borrow from epics, and a literary adventure like Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives can be an art novel, a detective story, an interview, a pornographic escapade, sci-fi is not so limited in its topical and stylistic options that it cannot cross over, lend, borrow, and thieve to and from other genres. Something about what sci-fi allows us to do to conventional social mores and rational worldviews creates discomfort that forces a restrictive labeling. In other words, if we can call our discomfort a name, put it at a distance, and compare it unfavorably to things which really aren't that different, but don't make us so uncomfortable, well then, the discomfort just doesn't matter so much anymore.

All this is to say, I'll be reading more sci-fi from here on out. But I won't choose it because it's sci-fi. I'll choose it because I like the author, or I read an interesting review, or someone recommended it to me. Precisely the way I now choose all the Literature I read. And when it comes right down to it, no matter what I choose, I'll be reading a text. A text that require me to be a reader, with all the strategies and elision of meaning and grasps at understanding that that label entails.

Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World

Despite seeing through the book's conceit, and predicting the form (if not the content) of its ending, I still enjoyed it. Mostly, I think for the characterizations, but there was also the fun of the puzzle. Shriver imbues certain phrases with multiple levels of meaning by putting them in the mouths of different characters, or the same character in a different situation.

Not to give too much away, but if you don't like being played with a bit as a reader, I wouldn't recommend this one...more I went to the library for another book altogether and this title caught my eye. I compared its first paragraph with the first of the novel I came for, and Shriver definitely won. I wish I could remember what the other book was, but all I can tell you is that its first paragraph informed me of the shape and color of precisely one rock. Perhaps on a beach, or lake side.

The Post-Birthday World, though, grabbed me at the get-go. Within a moment of reading, I knew this was a book about a woman, who illustrates children's books and lives with a man, with whom she is joining another couple for dinner and it's going to be awkward. How could I say no?

Chapter 3 threw me for a loop, because in it Shriver begins taking certain liberties with our readerly chronological expectations. As soon as I realized I was reading outside of the traditionally chronological novelistic framework, I got jumpy and excited about the experiment. While it doesn't push the boundaries of genre in the ways I'm really interested in these days, it's still pushing the boundaries. Seeing a writer willing to trust her readers to understand her nontraditional approach to time gives me hope for the publishing prospects of writers who believe their readers can handle forays into the far wilder woods of mixed-up hybrid genres.

Or perhaps I'm just pumped by the comic book version of this book that now exists in my head. The comics genre inherently has the tools to communicate and interrogate alternate versions of time, outside the norm of text progressing linearly. Pictures can slow you down, make you consider, and alert you immediately and unobtrusively to shifting perspectives, both spacial and temporal, in a way that words can't. Shriver doesn't even try to make them; she just jumps right in and lets you catch up as best as possible.

If I have a complaint, it's that once you catch up, the book's conceit lets you see ahead. It's a bit of a downer on the whole suspense side of things. Yet, despite seeing through the book's conceit, and predicting the form (if not the content) of its ending, I still enjoyed it. Mostly for the ideas it gave fuel too, and a bit for the characterizations, but also for the fun of the puzzle. Shriver imbues certain phrases with multiple levels of meaning by putting them in the mouths of different characters, or the same character in a different situation. Finding and taking apart those moments felt like solving a particularly slippery crossword clue.

Not to give too much away, but if you don't like being played with a bit as a reader, I wouldn't recommend this one. I would recommend it for anyone who enjoyed The Time Traveler's Wife for its unusual form as much as its love story.