Musing on children's literature

Last week's issue of the New Yorker seemed dedicated to undermining beloved childhood literature. Malcolm Gladwell's "The Courthouse Ring" faulted Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird for the limits of his liberalism. I wasn't especially moved when the article critiqued Atticus for appealing to individual consciences in his battle against Southern racism rather than fighting for systemic legal reform. We don't love literary characters because their social activism is well pitched. But I was more persuaded--and disturbed--when it examined his defense of Tom Robinson and showed how he built a case out of flimsy evidence by asking the jury to trade its anti-black prejudices for its anti-poor, white-trash prejudices. In the absence of hard evidence, he impugns the character of Mayella Ewell and her family, suggesting that we know what poor, prejudiced rednecks like the Ewells are like (incestuous, among other things). Even if the jury disagrees, the average middle-class reader swallows it whole. Ouch.

Edith isn't ready for To Kill a Mockingbird, but she is enjoying the Little House books. Judith Thurman's "Critic at Large" discussed Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane's mother-daughter collaboration on the Little House books that supposedly were the autobiographical fiction of Laura alone. Most fans of the books are aware that Laura wrote them late in life, that her daughter was a professional author, and that it is likely Rose assisted her mother with the books in some capacity. But most fans still hope that they were mainly Laura's work and that they are very close to nonfiction. Thurman's article describes how Rose insisted on shaping the prose to heighten the drama, uninterested in the veracity of the details she introduced. I have cherished the Little House books and the Ingalls family all my life, but suddenly the plague of grasshoppers section in On the Banks of Plum Creek, with which Edith is taken, seems perhaps a bit too ironic in its description of Pa exulting in the wheat crop he's about to harvest just as a dark cloud crosses the sun and grasshoppers start dropping everywhere.

Even more bothersome, the article describes the difficult relationship between the restless, unhappy Rose and her mother, who was never terribly affectionate. How could our beloved Laura not be an affectionate mother? The article points out that in their first few years of married life she and Almanzo lost a son, lost their home to fire, lost their crop to drought, and lost Almanzo's health to a crippling stroke; it speculates that Laura may simply not have had much left to give to her young daughter. Nevertheless, since the Little House books are fundamentally about how family members are all to each other through every kind of challenge on the frontier, showing themselves loving and strong (and civilized) even when living in a dugout or covered with grasshoppers or starving through endless blizzards, it is disappointing to think the real Laura had such a tortured relationship with her own daughter. In appears that the terrible challenges of life on the frontier could break people's personalities and relationships, those apparently unwavering bonds in the Little House books.

Which may be why I've warmed to the books that Edith loves best right now, Beverly Cleary's Ramona series. These make no claims to social critique or to autobiography. They depict instead a fictional family that is an every-family of middle America at the same time that its multidimensional characters are recognizable as unique people. The Quimby family relationships also remain strong and the characters lovable, but we are witness to the everyday strains and misundertsandings and frustrations between them.

Edith enjoys the books, I think, because she identifies both with willful, imaginative, stubborn younger sister Ramona and with older sister Beezus, who is conscientious, determined to be good, yet frustrated with all the attention that Ramona gets. Sometimes Beezus just doesn't love Ramona, she confesses shamefacedly in Beezus and Ramona--and Edith understands that. Ramona meanwhile longs for teachers to like her and parents to shower her with affection, and she grows upset and self-conscious when things don't go just as she envisions. Edith understands that, too.

For my part, I am appreciating the Quimby parents more than I ever did as a child. They are in their early to mid-thirties in most of the books, my current age (though they've been parenting since their early twenties). They have an extremely strong-willed preschooler, who grows into a fairly insistent, affection-hungry school-aged child. Yet while her willfulness makes for all kinds of domestic mishaps and adventures, Cleary expects readers to recognize that Ramona is fundamentally a good person, that her parents love her, and that at the end of the day, the Quimby family adventures are within the realm of normal life. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby parent their daughters according to their best common sense, sometimes getting tired or irritable but not reflecting self-consciously on their own parenting abilities nor viewing their daughters' personalities as somehow their creation. This is simply life, and everyone soldiers on. That's a welcome model in these days of Parenting as Project and parents as contestants in the sport of fashioning ideal families. Even relatively more recent family dramas, like the Sam and Anastasia Krupnik books that Edith is getting into now, depict parents who un-self-consciously serve hot dogs and chocolate milk for dinner and send their kids off to nursery school in a carpool that doesn't include Britax Marathon carseats for each of the half dozen passengers.

And although Scout Finch, Laura Ingalls, Ramona Quimby and Sam Krupnik all are close to their families and care very much about parental opinion, none of their stories could have been written if they didn't have independent reign of the neighborhood. (Or at least, if nine year olds weren't trusted to keep an eye on four year olds.)

I'm trying to imagine the domestic juvenile literature that will be written in the 21st century. Ramona Quimby is in the front yard working on her soccer dribbling technique under her father's guidance when Howie Kemp's mother pulls up in the SUV, lowers the back window so Howie can say hello to Ramona, then pulls out her Blackberry and asks Mr. Quimby if they can schedule a playdate for Ramona and Howie after soccer but before ballet the next Saturday afternoon. Henry Huggins's mother passes by walking Ribsy on a retractable leash; Henry has too much homework to walk the dog, and it wouldn't really be safe for an eleven year old to be out alone in the evening anyway. She and Mr. Quimby discuss the fifth grade science curriculum and share what they're thinking about whether to move Beezus and Henry to a charter school for middle school. Meanwhile the Quimbys, the Kemps and the Hugginses, having recognized Klickitat Street's overwhelming whiteness, search their souls for the subconscious racism that compelled them to buy into such a neighborhood, then organize a sustained campaign for racial diversity in Portland, attacking the root problem of economic discrimination in their bid to integrate.

I hope the New Yorker doesn't tear down too many more old favorites. I'm not sure there are going to be many contemporary classics to replace them.