Kid Stuff

At my parents' yesterday, I found a library copy of Paula Fox's The Stone-Faced Boy sitting in the front hall on top of a clean-laundry basket (paused for a rest on its way upstairs), nestled into a pink bath towel. I lay back on the couch and read it, start to finish, in a little over an hour - no great feat since it's well under a hundred pages. I liked that it had that real novella character, more like a short story in the way you can down it in one gulp, but with the greater time for back-story and characterization details that a novel has.

The story itself I was less sure about for the first thirty or forty pages. The writing had nothing bad about it, nothing that bothered me and or made me want to re-write sentences, but it was also not particularly excitingly brilliant, and right at first I found the protagonist, that stone-faced boy, a little unbelievable. He has lost the ability to show any affect, in his face or his voice or actions. The affect is all there inside of him, rather simply described -- he wished he could laugh, he wished he could cry, and so on. But the defence mechanism has taken on a life of its own and he is quite desperate to get rid of it.

He felt like smiling. Surely, he could smile out here in the dark, where there was no one around to see him. He took off his mitten and touched his mouth. It was not smiling.

Then a reflection prompted me to start enjoying it with a particular emotionality. I was a very unhappy kid, as far back as I can remember, and certainly from when I started school and had to interact with lots of other little kids, who I found mostly scary and brutal. Now, I don't think too much about my day-to-day unhappiness when I was six, since it was twenty-three years ago and I fail to remember most of it anyhow. But I'm reminded of it in a kind of embittered way when I'm confronted with some images of childhood (like the really cute kids who run around in the elementary school playground outside my window - which, believe me, it makes me feel terrible to have any negative feelings about), because it can seem like almost everyone, whatever life held in store for later, remembers childhood as a time of joy and abandon. But here was the stone-faced boy, feeling quite a lot how I remember feeling, trapped, at the mercy of uncomprehending and merciless others, and fearful. It made me feel that companionship feeling when you find people who share characteristics you're embarrassed about having yourself. Even though it was twenty-three years ago.

And I kind of enjoyed its central symbol, though it's the kind of facile symbolism, like that lightning-struck tree in Wuthering Heights, that usually really bugs me. It's given to him by his great-aunt: a geode, a rock with a small crack in it through which he can see that the inside is hollowed out and filled with in-facing crystals.

I finished the book, like I said, in about an hour and a half, and the end gave me that nice satisfied feeling, and I turned the next page and read Paula Fox's little biography there. Turns out, she's mostly known for kids' books. She started with the kids' books, for which she got several big awards and stuff, and then wrote some adult books, of which it mentions two. Which made me wonder: which is this? When I think about it, everything about it would be suitable for a kid whose reading level is just a little advanced. And it has those hallmarks of kids' fiction: a boy with a quasi-magical problem or characteristic (his face won't move) and a simply expressed emotional issue (think Jacob Two-Two or Curious George), super simple symbolism, parents who are no help at all, a quest (I didn't tell you about it but it's there), and a warm fuzzy resolution.

Age, and genre, categorizations are artificial and useless when it comes to well-written books. I find it funny that people are very resistant to using the genre or age labels when it's a book that they think of as good literature: meaning people don't like it if you call The Chrysalids or 1984 fantasy/sci fi, or The Catcher in the Rye young adult lit, which it surely is. And it seems like the reason they don't like it is because they so believe in the labels (and therefore do not read sci fi, say, which makes 1984 definitionally not that). I'm not into that, but I suspect my response to The Stone-Faced Boy would have been different in some way if it had been presented to me as a kids' book but that's a weakness in me as a reader. Incidentally, someone in some marketing department somewhere decided it would be better for me not to know that up front: the cover is decidedly un-kid-like. It's a colourless close-up of a sculpted white clay eye, and kind of creepy if anything. I'm guessing there was once a very different cover.

So I'm shouting it from the rooftops: I read a kids' book yesterday and it was totally at my level.

Climbing a ladder to the moon

As faithful readers of this column will know, a little while ago someone posted a comment that I should read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Conveniently, this same person had once sent her brother a copy of the book, and since I live with her brother, the book was already on my bookshelf. And I'm very happy she did, because I loved the book. I was maybe particularly primed to like it because, also as previously mentioned in this blog, I like reading pop science and over the years have built up some knowledge of physics and astronomy, the little my mathematically-limited head will allow. Not that this book requires an independent interest in science. It looks at its subject - events in cosmogony, physics and early biology - in a completely poetic way.

The beauty of Cosmicomics is that it takes some concepts that are incredibly counterintuitive, like the Big Bang, or the curvature of space, and tells you about them in a very intuitive, kind of traditional, narrative way, from the perspective of someone who was there at the time (our narrator is old Qfwfq, who has managed to be present at many opportune moments in the history of the universe, even some mutually incompatible ones, which only shows some of his talents). Many writers make use of scientific concepts for literary ends, especially, I've found, quantum theory - like that terrible book I gave up on in my last post, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, but also some really good things, like the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Cosmicomics is like none of those. It inhabits the beginning of the universe, the creation of the galaxies, the "fluid, shapeless nebula" that will later become the planets of the solar system, and gives you ways to think about concepts you've probably been told of before but were never able to square with your human perception of physics.

Each chapter begins with the statement of a scientific theory, and then moves into Qfwfq's telling of what it was like. The first chapter is a totally beautiful story about a group who rows their boat out to the moon at a time when the moon is close enough to the earth that you can get onto it by jumping off the top of a long ladder (the moon's gravitational force helps you at that last stage). Some of the chapters reminded me of Kipling's Just So Stories, for instance the one about the Big Bang where everyone present was occupying a single point in space until a woman several of them were in love with said she would make them some noodles if only she had some more room to roll out the dough. Some of the chapters also reminded me of the first two chapters of Genesis and of other creation myths, especially one in which Qfwfq and a friend are playing a game of marbles which turns, quite naturally, into a game of creating galaxies.

I was less captivated by the chapters about the dinosaur and the mollusk. It's a much more usual kind of thing, the literary anthropomorphism of animals. But the literary anthropomorphism of primordial goop requires a much rarer imagination and writing talent. That isn't to say that I didn't like those chapters. The entire book, quite aside from being an impressive feat, is beautiful and magical and light and airy and a really fun read.