on reading books to children

The thing about making the same joke over and over and over again is that after a while it becomes pretty clear to everyone concerned that you're not joking. Did any of you people ever notice that your parents read to you without needing to tell the world how annoying it was? Many of the elementary duties of life are not especially pleasant, so just get over yourself and put a sock in it.

And maybe repetition of such duties is not an enemy of the good life, but an intrinsic part of it. To set yourself straight, read Chesterton, who has precisely the right attitude about this:

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

My son is 22 now. What I wouldn't give to be able to go back to the time when I read to him every day. (As long as I don't have to lose all the really good things about having a grown-up young man for a son.) (I guess what I'm really saying is that I have loved every stage of being a parent and wouldn't willingly forego any of it.)

writing for young people revisited

Jonathan Myerson has standards. Not for him the craven apologies of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Kent, their admission of wrongdoing at having suggested that children’s literature isn’t really literature at all. Myerson hoists his literary flag:

Come on, University of Kent, why the grovelling retreat? Your creative writing website got it right first time. You know perfectly well that when you made a distinction between "great literature" and "mass-market thrillers or children's fiction", you were standing up for something. That Keats is different from Dylan, or, in this instance, that Philip Roth does say something rather more challenging than JK Rowling, that Jonathan Franzen does create storylines more ambiguous and questioning than Stephanie Meyer's. What's so wrong with that? I'll go forward carrying the banner even if you won't.

Like Kent, we at City University take on creative writing MA students specifically to write literary novels – so we are quite ready to define what's required to write for adults as opposed to children. It isn't about the quality of the prose: the best children's books are better structured and written than many adult works. Nor is it about imaginary worlds – among the Lit Gang, for instance, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Chabon have all created plenty of those. It's simpler than that: a novel written for children omits certain adult-world elements which you would expect to find in a novel aimed squarely at grown-up readers.

The problem here is that Myerson fails to see that self-consciously “adult” novels, while they are indeed open to experiences, and to techniques, that children’s lit doesn't reckon with, also have blind spots, vast areas of human experience of which they are apparently ignorant. The estimable Adam Roberts covered this just a couple of months ago in an absolutely brilliant blog post that I wrote about here. The elaboration of "ambiguous and questioning ... story lines" may be a literary virtue — though perhaps not one that Jonathan Franzen possesses — but it is certainly not the only literary virtue or an indispensable one. The novel that is self-consciously for adults isn’t more comprehensive than the novel that is self-consciously for young people; it just covers different things. And, as Roberts makes clear, it habitually omits some of the most important experiences of life.

children, stories, and tears

Here’s a meditation on children’s books that can still make adults cry. The list is largely what you would expect: The Velveteen Rabbit, The Giving Tree, Charlotte’s Web, etc. Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”, which Lynne Sharon Schwartz has called “the saddest story ever written,” which may well be true, is mentioned also. I was also pleased to see the story link to this strange and epic thread at my old stomping grounds The American Scene.

I didn't read any of these when I was a child, but I read The Velveteen Rabbit as a teenager. I was a receiving clerk at a bookstore, and when opening a box of books paused, for some reason, to read that one. Did it extract a tear or two from my callow adolescent eyes? Indeed it did. But primarily it made me angry: I saw it as a crassly blatant attempt to manipulate the emotions of children, who, I thought, are the softest of targets for this kind of thing. Not long afterward I read Charlotte’s Web and had the same response.

And I’ve never been able to dismiss that initial response: I still find myself annoyed by, if not actually angry at, children’s books that end in death or other catastrophic loss. This is probably not rational — a good case can be made for the need to introduce children to the fact of death — but I have always had this lurking feeling that some of these writers enjoy the task just a little too much.