Black Gate

If you have children at home, you know their propensity for asking questions. “Can I have some more?” “Why not?” “Are we there yet?” “Do I have to?” These questions and many others are familiar to everyone who deals with children, and they (the questions, that is) usually don’t pose much of a problem. (In my house, we have long had a standard reply to this kind of query, taken from a Ring Lardner short story: “Shut up, he explained.”)

Not all childish questions are so easily disposed of, however. The hard ones can range from the mathematical, such as “What if there was no such thing as five?” to the epistemological, like “How do you know?” The roughest ones are literally life and death: “Why did my puppy, why did my friend, why did my Grandpa have to die?” When faced with these, too often the adult impulse is to brush the child off with a pat answer that answers nothing, or better yet, to quickly change the subject.

Tough questions don’t cease to be questions, though, just because we grow too experienced, too jaded, too busy, too complacent, too disappointed, too bored — too old to be willing to ask them ourselves.

This is one of the reasons children can keep you feeling young… when they’re not making you feel ancient. It’s also why reading great children’s literature can be such a wonderful, renewing experience; such books are addressed to an audience that hasn’t yet gotten into the fatal habit of thinking that all questions have either already been answered or are unanswerable. Such books are themselves like fearless, inquisitive children; they’re willing to speak their minds, whatever the consequences. Books like this are assured of long lives…books like Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s fantasy, Tuck Everlasting.

In the little town of Treegap, in the first week of August in the year 1880, ten year old Winnie Foster feels like life’s possibilities have already dried up. Her overprotective family won’t let her roam, won’t let her experience all that she wants to; her world is cruelly circumscribed by the white picket fence that keeps her safely penned in her front yard. Before the hot August days are over, though, Winnie will have an encounter that will change her life forever, and she’ll be faced with a momentous and irrevocable choice.

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On May 25th I finished my thirteenth year at the small private school where I teach fourth grade. I love my job and I love my students, but remember the transports of joy that you felt when you were a kid, when the dismissal bell finally rang on that last day of school? I can assure you that your happiness was as nothing compared to the incandescent elation teachers feel on that final afternoon of the second semester.

At my school, we get eight weeks off, and I spend them much as I did when I was in school myself — I make a big stack of paperbacks and I read as many of them as I can before the next school year begins. Last summer, for some perverse reason I no longer remember, I changed my routine a bit; instead of tearing through the usual pile of science fiction/fantasy/mystery yarns, I decided to take on a different kind of book: David Foster Wallace’s postmodern magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Though it is itself marginally science fiction, Wallace’s massive novel is about as far removed from the kind of genre reading that usually fills my vacation as it is possible to get. I originally had some notion of doing a fair amount of my “normal” summer reading alongside of Infinite Jest, but it didn’t work out that way. I’m glad I read the novel, but it absolutely exhausted me; after hewing my way through thirty or forty pages I barely had enough physical and mental energy to hoist myself out of my chair, much less crack open a gaudy-covered Ace reprint of Radium Raiders of Deneb by Lester Cragwell Griggs.

If you’ve never tackled it, reading Infinite Jest is like driving coast-to-coast on a state of the art superhighway… that has a speed bump every fifty feet, for three thousand miles. I did manage to get Son of Tarzan read in between bouts with Wallace’s knotted prose, but the two books didn’t mix well, and left me feeling slightly seasick, not to mention somewhat confused about the nature of reality.

In any case, this year I was determined to return to sanity and my standard procedure and see if it’s possible to overdose on the heady fumes that waft from the pages of forty year old paperbacks. I now submit the results of my experiment for your edification… or, if you wish, to act as a grim warning.

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