Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Goolrick spins small-town tale in 'Heading Out to Wonderful'
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAYRobert Goolrick, whose debut novel, 'A Reliable Wife,' was a smash in 2010, next tells a tale about life in a small Virginia town, much like White Stone, where he lives. 'Heading Out to Wonderful' is out Tuesday.
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAYRobert Goolrick, whose debut novel, 'A Reliable Wife,' was a smash in 2010, next tells a tale about life in a small Virginia town, much like White Stone, where he lives. 'Heading Out to Wonderful' is out Tuesday.
Once a hard-partying New York ad executive who ended up on welfare and in Alcoholics Anonymous, he is now well known as the author of a highly praised, best-selling debut novel, A Reliable Wife, and a blistering tell-all family memoir, The End of the World as We Know It.Instead of passing wanton nights at New York nightclubs, today he finds himself signing books everywhere from Paris to Los Angeles, all part of a nine-week tour to promote his latest novel, Heading Out to Wonderful (Algonquin, $24.95). It goes on sale Tuesday. Not bad for a man who admits he once led a "tortured life," until he found "the nerve to write," an endeavor that has, for better or worse, put him on a grueling book tour this summer."The problem is I don't know what to pack," he confesses before heading to Europe, in a conversation on the screened porch of his Virginia home, which boasts a fabulous view of the Rappahannock River off in the distance.But compared with his fast-lane days, when the office receptionist used to sell him cocaine from her desk drawer, the challenges of packing for a book tour seem downright domestic.Over a lunch of crab and lobster ni?oise salad he has prepared, Goolrick, 63, talks candidly about his ever-evolving life, his writing and his love of his native state. He calls his new novel "a love letter to Virginia."Robert Goolrick, while a novelist and memoirist, is also an accomplished essayist, musing on everything from the “passion of place” to what twists of fate make a person become homeless. A few of his essays can be found on his website, robertgoolrick.com.One of his most amusing involves his thoughts about Facebook and why he left the social site. His piece ran in The Daily Beast in 2010:
“Facebook to me is the cocktail party of the new millennium. When I joined years ago, it was like a community bulletin board where people you knew would post items of interest or urgency or charm,” he begins. “Now it’s turned into Grand Central Station at rush hour, with everybody bumping into everybody else, and a track announcer droning on and on the list of trains and platforms, echoing in the cavernous halls so that one can’t hear anything or tell what platform the 6:10 to Greenwich will be leaving from. Facebook is a cocktail party thrown in Grand Central at rush hour.”
He was happy with his decision to unfriend the world. His publisher was not.
So is he back now? Yes.
“Algonquin thought it would be a good idea with a new book coming out.”
Not that it's always pretty. Heading Out to Wonderful is filled with the pettiness of small-town life, violence and racism, all common in 1948 rural Virginia. "But the people are my people, who I am," he says, adding that he set his newest novel in summertime for a reason. "I remember the summers so clearly."Goolrick grew up in Lexington, Va., where his father taught at Virginia Military Institute. Even today, he looks the part of a Southern prep, dressed nattily in a navy blue-and-white-striped blazer from Brooks Brothers, jeans and loafers.His newest novel is based on a true story he was told long ago while visiting a Greek isle, a tale that stayed with him for 25 years. It involves a small-town love affair gone terribly wrong. So he transported the Greek characters to rural Virginia and made the youngest, a boy named Sam, the narrator. Sixty years later, Sam tells the story of an enigmatic stranger, Charlie Beale, who arrives in town and falls in obsessive love with another man's teenage bride, Sylvan Glass. Trouble brews.Goolrick recites the novel's first line: "The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that." And with that, he's off, storytelling the way he did in A Reliable Wife, once again building his tale to a riveting and violent end.A Reliable Wife (2009) became a huge success and the darling of book clubs. It was on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list for 32 weeks in 2010, reaching No. 6, and has sold just over a million copies in the USA.Chuck Adams, Goolrick's editor at Algonquin, says that when he first read Wife, "I knew immediately there was an amazing story there, with bigger-than-life characters … and emotions that people can relate to."He compares the novel to the works of Edna Ferber (Show Boat, Giant, Cimarron) — "big setting, big story." That big story is about to be made into a movie by Columbia Pictures.Finding his nicheDoes Goolrick have stars in mind who could play Catherine Land, the not-so-reliable wife? "I do," he says, chuckling, "but it hardly matters."Goolrick knows he will be losing control of his now-famous story but hopes Hollywood remains true to the tale of a mail-order wife who shows up at a Wisconsin train station on a cold winter's day in 1907, carrying not only her bags but a scheme: to marry the man who ordered her, kill him, then live out her days as a wealthy widow. But her new husband has plans of his own, too.A sophomore novel is always a challenge, and Goolrick has a tough act to follow. Publishers Weekly says his newest tale of doomed love — sound familiar? — "resonates like a folk ballad" and packs an "emotional punch." Kirkus Reviews called it "powerful but problematic," however.Goolrick pays little attention to reviews and is still amused by the fact The New York Times never reviewed A Reliable Wife.Instead, he just writes, getting down to work early, settling in front of his Apple computer on a worn red velvet armchair at 5 a.m. He says he's happier than he should be when writing: "I'm safe." His friends agree he is finally where he belongs.Goolrick was fired from his New York advertising job at Grey Advertising when he was 53, something he says often happens to older employers in the advertising world. He had been there nearly 30 years.But he credits his years writing ad copy — from Kohler faucets to Pantene — for making him a better writer. "It teaches you to cover a lot of information in a short space."Living hand to mouth after his advertising days, he came to the novel-writing game late, in his mid-50s, but his editor agrees that Goolrick's training served him well. "A Reliable Wife did not read like a first novel," says Adams. "It was very mature."But it takes Goolrick a long time to get a novel started, because he tells the story to himself over and over again in his head, like he did with the tale he heard back in Greece. "I don't write anything down. The South is an oral culture. I have to be able to tell the story at a dinner party, but when I do write, I do it quite quickly."Having moved back to Virginia three years ago, he says he's in a good place these days. Goolrick repeats the word "safe" often, saying he's happy living alone (he has had affairs with both men and women but never married) in this rented 1870 farmhouse with his Sussex spaniel, Preacher, whose grandfather won the Westminster dog show.It's far from the childhood trauma he revealed in his memoir. He alleges sexual abuse at the hands of his father that began when he was only 4 years old. He spent a good portion of his adult life trying to escape the memories through drugs, alcohol, medication and psychiatric sessions. For a time, he was cutting himself with razors.Not surprisingly, one of the themes in his newest novel is the vulnerability of children. His narrator, young Sam, is witness to more than his share of horrors at the hands of adults."Childhood is a dangerous place," says Goolrick. "No one leaves unscarred. It's an important theme. You never hear from the victims. It's what happens after that, later in life, that is so destructive."His editor Adams says the darkness of Goolrick's childhood "shades everything he writes."Sober yet 'exotic'Goolrick says he has never discussed the memoir with anyone, including his sister and brother. His brother did not speak to him for two years after the book came out. His alcoholic parents are both dead."It caused all kinds of ruckus," he says, adding that the dust eventually settled. In interviews, he says that people who knew his parents well have called him a liar or accused him of having an "overactive imagination." But he's still happy he wrote the book. "You can't write an honest memoir if you're feeling sorry for yourself."Goolrick has been sober for 21 years, although he still smokes a pack of Marlboros a day. He suspects he is looked upon as an "exotic" by the town locals but says he's treated as a regular person, "which is why I moved here." He didn't want to be part of the "literary freak show" in New York, perhaps why his publisher is out of Chapel Hill, N.C., and not Manhattan.He's working on a novel about a young girl who lives on a commune and flies — "but only at night" — and then he's going to write a prequel to Heading Out to Wonderful, zeroing in on the two suitcases Charlie Beale carries into tiny Brownsburg, Va. One is filled with money, the other knives that he uses in his new job at the local butcher shop.And the mystery of that suitcase full of money?"You'll have to read the next book," he says.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Review-a-Day for Mon, Sep 19: Mister Wonderful: A Love Story
by Daniel Clowes A review by James R. Fleming
In many respects Daniel Clowes's Mister Wonderful cannot be properly described as a graphic novel (Clowes, for the record, refers to the book simply as "a love story"). While the book is certainly what might broadly be defined as an "illustrated narrative" -- or what the less fussy among us still like to call a "comic book" -- it bears none of the standard structural or thematic hallmarks of a novel. The narrative is short and succinct, the perspective is limited to one character and focuses on one extended incident, and the story arrives at a rather definitive conclusion, hence the book can be best conceptualized not as a "novel" per se but as an illustrated short story. This is an important distinction to make, though one that is hardly offered in critical discussions and reviews of graphic narratives. The broad and often misleading term "graphic novel" is usually applied by publishers and reviewers to any sort of illustrated narrative that is published in book form, without consideration given to whether said work is in fact, truly a novel or not.
In terms of plot, Mister Wonderful's themes and ideas are pretty standard, if not downright familiar, especially to regular readers of Clowes's work. Clowes does not break any new thematic or psychological ground here; this is not an in-depth examination into the complexities of the protagonist's psyche or the nature of the world in which he lives. Mister Wonderful is simply about a day (or part of a day) in the life a regular guy named Marshall who falls for an imperfect girl and tries to handle their developing relationship in the best way he can. The story is limited, mostly, to the couple's first date and initial relationship crisis (which occurs in the middle of their first date).
It is in that very simplicity and relative familiarity that the story's originality and brilliance rests. Throughout all of his major works -- Ghost World, David Boring and Wilson, in particular -- Clowes presents us with common eccentrics, temper-cases, and weirdos. He is, at his best, a chronicler of everyday oddballs and pains in the ass, much like the great -- and vastly under-appreciated -- fiction writer Stephen Dixon (Clowes's protagonists, though, tend to lack the acerbic wit, intelligence and intrinsic solipsism of Dixon's protagonists). However, in Mister Wonderful in particular, Clowes offers his protagonists just as they are without celebrating or, for that matter, apologizing or advocating on their behalf. There is a certain humility that shines through this book far more so than in Clowes's other works, a quiet willingness on Clowes's part not to over do it or show off his own intelligence, to let his protagonist speak for himself without direct authorial intervention or judgment.
Clowes's art is as clear, clean, and visceral as ever in Mister Wonderful; not a single panel, line or splash of color is wasted. Instead his drawings work in seamless conjunction with his narrative by informing, supporting and enforcing the story itself. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Clowes manages to avoid packing his drawings with an overwhelming amount of superfluous details and "Easter eggs" that would serve to distract our attention from the essence of the story itself.
Mister Wonderful might ultimately be understood as a thematic companion piece -- and even counterpoint -- to his previous book, Wilson. Taken together, the books offer two radically different possibilities for two rather miserable and self-doubting people. However, while Wilson serves as a study in misery and borderline sociopathy and concludes on a decidedly stark and pessimistic note, Mister Wonderful is instead a rather hopeful consideration of a man who looks for love and finds it, if in a somewhat imperfect and problematic form. While Wilson is unable and unwilling to find satisfaction in any relationship he engages in or to recognize and attempt to reconcile his own personality deficits and psychoses, Marshall is able to realize his own faults and foibles, to accept both himself and, by extension, the imperfect love he comes to find.
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Monday, October 24, 2011
Review-a-Day for Mon, Sep 19: Mister Wonderful: A Love Story
by Daniel Clowes A review by James R. Fleming
In many respects Daniel Clowes's Mister Wonderful cannot be properly described as a graphic novel (Clowes, for the record, refers to the book simply as "a love story"). While the book is certainly what might broadly be defined as an "illustrated narrative" -- or what the less fussy among us still like to call a "comic book" -- it bears none of the standard structural or thematic hallmarks of a novel. The narrative is short and succinct, the perspective is limited to one character and focuses on one extended incident, and the story arrives at a rather definitive conclusion, hence the book can be best conceptualized not as a "novel" per se but as an illustrated short story. This is an important distinction to make, though one that is hardly offered in critical discussions and reviews of graphic narratives. The broad and often misleading term "graphic novel" is usually applied by publishers and reviewers to any sort of illustrated narrative that is published in book form, without consideration given to whether said work is in fact, truly a novel or not.
In terms of plot, Mister Wonderful's themes and ideas are pretty standard, if not downright familiar, especially to regular readers of Clowes's work. Clowes does not break any new thematic or psychological ground here; this is not an in-depth examination into the complexities of the protagonist's psyche or the nature of the world in which he lives. Mister Wonderful is simply about a day (or part of a day) in the life a regular guy named Marshall who falls for an imperfect girl and tries to handle their developing relationship in the best way he can. The story is limited, mostly, to the couple's first date and initial relationship crisis (which occurs in the middle of their first date).
It is in that very simplicity and relative familiarity that the story's originality and brilliance rests. Throughout all of his major works -- Ghost World, David Boring and Wilson, in particular -- Clowes presents us with common eccentrics, temper-cases, and weirdos. He is, at his best, a chronicler of everyday oddballs and pains in the ass, much like the great -- and vastly under-appreciated -- fiction writer Stephen Dixon (Clowes's protagonists, though, tend to lack the acerbic wit, intelligence and intrinsic solipsism of Dixon's protagonists). However, in Mister Wonderful in particular, Clowes offers his protagonists just as they are without celebrating or, for that matter, apologizing or advocating on their behalf. There is a certain humility that shines through this book far more so than in Clowes's other works, a quiet willingness on Clowes's part not to over do it or show off his own intelligence, to let his protagonist speak for himself without direct authorial intervention or judgment.
Clowes's art is as clear, clean, and visceral as ever in Mister Wonderful; not a single panel, line or splash of color is wasted. Instead his drawings work in seamless conjunction with his narrative by informing, supporting and enforcing the story itself. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Clowes manages to avoid packing his drawings with an overwhelming amount of superfluous details and "Easter eggs" that would serve to distract our attention from the essence of the story itself.
Mister Wonderful might ultimately be understood as a thematic companion piece -- and even counterpoint -- to his previous book, Wilson. Taken together, the books offer two radically different possibilities for two rather miserable and self-doubting people. However, while Wilson serves as a study in misery and borderline sociopathy and concludes on a decidedly stark and pessimistic note, Mister Wonderful is instead a rather hopeful consideration of a man who looks for love and finds it, if in a somewhat imperfect and problematic form. While Wilson is unable and unwilling to find satisfaction in any relationship he engages in or to recognize and attempt to reconcile his own personality deficits and psychoses, Marshall is able to realize his own faults and foibles, to accept both himself and, by extension, the imperfect love he comes to find.
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Rain Taxi, a winner of the Alternative Press Award for Best Arts & Literature Coverage, is a quarterly publication that publishes reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre. Essays, interviews, and in-depth reviews reflect Rain Taxi's commitment to innovative publishing.
Click here to subscribe to Rain Taxi, ride of choice for the Lit Fiend! .
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder)
by L. Frank Baum A review by Ellen Handler Spitz
Although details have not yet been released, the Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By midsummer this year, the Harry Potter film series will have run its course, and what better way to fill the gap than by taking up Baum's set of Oz books (this is the first), with its cast of zany characters including a princess who undergoes a sex change and a legion of splendidly garbed humanoids whose limbs end in wheels instead of hands and feet? I disagree with Salman Rushdie's elevation of the iconic and justly well-loved 1939 film, the Judy Garland one, over the original Baum text. This text -- literary, philosophical, and brilliant -- merits priority.
Notwithstanding the whirlwind of adaptations, adulterations, dramatizations, spin-offs, ad-ons, pop-ups, memorabilia, and kitsch that have spiraled throughout the century since its original publication by George M. Hill in 1900 (with illustrations by W.W. Denslow), the original masterpiece survives and defies its would-be re-fashioners. Do we know why? Reading it again and trying to recall how turning its pages felt to me years ago as a child growing up in New York, I realized one would need a cloak of invisibility so as to slink past that angel with the flaming sword.
The book drops you, rubbing your eyes, into a mysterious ether -- onto shifting sands (recall the "Deadly Desert") -- into oneiric realms, where you lose yourself and wander, enchanted: "The cyclone had set the house down, very gently... in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty...." "The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick..." "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?" Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself. Yet few readers have focused on the book's prodigious mental adventures.
But first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum's story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow's line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion's nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. One adverb reveals all: "'From the Land of Oz,' said Dorothy gravely."
Beyond this -- beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude -- Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children's terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He actually helps children learn to think. The philosopher Gareth Matthews, in Philosophy and the Young Child, points especially to the Tin Woodman. This character may trouble children, who cringe inwardly at the thought of limbs being chopped off and cannot help wondering whether they could still be themselves if their parts were replaced. In a similar way, Matthews observed, Plutarch recounted the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus, which, on display at Athens, had its planks supplanted when, one after another, they rotted away, until the entire ship was replaced, whereupon, the question arose as to whether what was now on display could still be deemed the ship of Theseus. Even a young child can thus grasp the power of Baum's metaphor. A welter of complex emotions arises when we cannot hold fast to a stable and continuous identity.
Dorothy and her readers learn similarly from encounters with the Lion. After she slaps his nose and he withdraws weeping (and, in Denslow's illustration, wiping his tears away with his tail), she asks him what makes him a coward: this is a child's quintessentially philosophical question. The Lion answers that it is a mystery: he was born that way. But when the Tin Woodman intervenes to suppose that, since the Lion's heart beats so fast when he is afraid, maybe he is suffering from a heart disease, the Lion responds meditatively: "Perhaps ... if I had no heart I should not be a coward." It is easy to miss the gravity of this line.
Later in the same scene, Dorothy makes an observation to the Lion that all the other beasts in the forest must be more cowardly than he, since they allow him to scare them so easily. To which, the Lion replies: "They really are ... but that doesn't make me any braver." Thus Baum asks to us to consider whether virtue may be a matter of absolute rather than relative standards: a sophisticated idea for a children's book. His Lion wants to feel his bravery on his own terms.
Toward the story's end, the Wizard's actions raise serious questions in the domain of ethics. Dorothy, now bitterly disappointed and justifiably angry at the apparently fierce, chameleon-like Wizard for his failure to keep his promises to her and her friends (even though they have fulfilled his demand and have destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West) tells him he is "a very bad man." He answers her by saying that in fact he is really a very good man but a very bad wizard. This answer, as the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle might have pointed out, is a category mistake. Whereas, Dorothy is speaking of goodness in a moral sense, the Wizard is referring to badness or incompetence in a purely technical sense.
Later in the story, after the hot air balloon has burst its strings and ascended, leaving Dorothy stranded in Oz with Toto, and the Wizard has vanished beyond the clouds, Dorothy, despite her disillusionment and remorse, absolves the Wizard and forgives him. She says that, after all, he was a good man, even though he was truly a bad Wizard. She does this with the thoughtful justification that "he had done his best." Thus, Dorothy -- wise child -- helps sort out the category confusion by intuitively grasping that, whereas, in ethics, intention is central to our judgment of what is good and what is not and must be taken into account, in the realm of action we weigh results, quite apart from intention. Wanting to do well does not carry the same weight as wanting to do good.
Another philosophical theme: Dorothy's three friends, as we realize almost from the start of their journey, possess unawares the boons they seek from Oz. By employing this conceit -- the "brainless" Scarecrow, for example, turns out to be the one who conceives the ingenious idea of chopping down a tree to make a bridge across the gulf they must cross in order to escape the ferocious Kalidahs -- Baum asks us to ponder the value of self-knowledge and self-awareness. He makes us reflect on the relevance of these capacities in education and in other spheres of life and, indeed, in any pilgrimage that can be conceived as an adventure along a yellow brick road. He treats here, in his way, the theme made famous by Eliot's luminous lines from The Four Quartets, penned over forty years later: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."
Dorothy's direct interactions with the Wicked Witch also prove highly instructive. Seeing the mark made by the protective kiss on her forehead, the Witch backs off, for, as Baum writes, the Power of Good is greater than the Power of Evil. But, undaunted in her malevolence, the Witch persists with her scheming and cleverly concludes that, since Dorothy does not know how to use her power, or even understand that she has power, she can still be enslaved. Once again Baum opens our eyes to the tremendous value of self-knowledge. The narrative circles back again and again to the ancient Greek adage, thought to have been inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself." And reflecting on that, we perceive its intimate connection with the problem of identity and with, therefore, the ship of Theseus.
The question of merit, and the meaning of merit, also echoes throughout Oz. After the friends reach the Emerald City at last, the Wizard asks Dorothy why he should help her, and she answers touchingly: "Because you are strong and I am weak; because you are a Great Wizard and I am only a helpless little girl." These words ring with the logic of youth -- a small child, by virtue of her being, deserves nurturance, protection, and gratification. Babies are unconditionally loved. We ask nothing of them. Yet as they grow older, rules ensue, and merit rears its head. "In this country," the Wizard replies to Dorothy, "everyone must pay for everything he gets." Similarly, to the Scarecrow, he repeats, "I never grant favors without some return." These interviews occur, moreover, at the precise midpoint of the book. They highlight a significant milestone in the learning process.
It may be too much to hope that a new movie of Oz directed by Sam Raimi will try to convey any of this intellectual richness. Yet beyond spreading color, invention, and enchantment, L. Frank Baum's masterpiece remains a literary work that inspires children to think; its well-worn printed pages and its quaint pictures open onto serious and expansive vistas of mental excursion.
Ellen Handler Spitz is the Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her latest book is Illuminating Childhood.
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Monday, June 13, 2011
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder)
by L. Frank Baum A review by Ellen Handler Spitz
Although details have not yet been released, the Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By midsummer this year, the Harry Potter film series will have run its course, and what better way to fill the gap than by taking up Baum's set of Oz books (this is the first), with its cast of zany characters including a princess who undergoes a sex change and a legion of splendidly garbed humanoids whose limbs end in wheels instead of hands and feet? I disagree with Salman Rushdie's elevation of the iconic and justly well-loved 1939 film, the Judy Garland one, over the original Baum text. This text -- literary, philosophical, and brilliant -- merits priority.
Notwithstanding the whirlwind of adaptations, adulterations, dramatizations, spin-offs, ad-ons, pop-ups, memorabilia, and kitsch that have spiraled throughout the century since its original publication by George M. Hill in 1900 (with illustrations by W.W. Denslow), the original masterpiece survives and defies its would-be re-fashioners. Do we know why? Reading it again and trying to recall how turning its pages felt to me years ago as a child growing up in New York, I realized one would need a cloak of invisibility so as to slink past that angel with the flaming sword.
The book drops you, rubbing your eyes, into a mysterious ether -- onto shifting sands (recall the "Deadly Desert") -- into oneiric realms, where you lose yourself and wander, enchanted: "The cyclone had set the house down, very gently... in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty...." "The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick..." "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?" Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself. Yet few readers have focused on the book's prodigious mental adventures.
But first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum's story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow's line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion's nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. One adverb reveals all: "'From the Land of Oz,' said Dorothy gravely."
Beyond this -- beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude -- Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children's terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He actually helps children learn to think. The philosopher Gareth Matthews, in Philosophy and the Young Child, points especially to the Tin Woodman. This character may trouble children, who cringe inwardly at the thought of limbs being chopped off and cannot help wondering whether they could still be themselves if their parts were replaced. In a similar way, Matthews observed, Plutarch recounted the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus, which, on display at Athens, had its planks supplanted when, one after another, they rotted away, until the entire ship was replaced, whereupon, the question arose as to whether what was now on display could still be deemed the ship of Theseus. Even a young child can thus grasp the power of Baum's metaphor. A welter of complex emotions arises when we cannot hold fast to a stable and continuous identity.
Dorothy and her readers learn similarly from encounters with the Lion. After she slaps his nose and he withdraws weeping (and, in Denslow's illustration, wiping his tears away with his tail), she asks him what makes him a coward: this is a child's quintessentially philosophical question. The Lion answers that it is a mystery: he was born that way. But when the Tin Woodman intervenes to suppose that, since the Lion's heart beats so fast when he is afraid, maybe he is suffering from a heart disease, the Lion responds meditatively: "Perhaps ... if I had no heart I should not be a coward." It is easy to miss the gravity of this line.
Later in the same scene, Dorothy makes an observation to the Lion that all the other beasts in the forest must be more cowardly than he, since they allow him to scare them so easily. To which, the Lion replies: "They really are ... but that doesn't make me any braver." Thus Baum asks to us to consider whether virtue may be a matter of absolute rather than relative standards: a sophisticated idea for a children's book. His Lion wants to feel his bravery on his own terms.
Toward the story's end, the Wizard's actions raise serious questions in the domain of ethics. Dorothy, now bitterly disappointed and justifiably angry at the apparently fierce, chameleon-like Wizard for his failure to keep his promises to her and her friends (even though they have fulfilled his demand and have destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West) tells him he is "a very bad man." He answers her by saying that in fact he is really a very good man but a very bad wizard. This answer, as the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle might have pointed out, is a category mistake. Whereas, Dorothy is speaking of goodness in a moral sense, the Wizard is referring to badness or incompetence in a purely technical sense.
Later in the story, after the hot air balloon has burst its strings and ascended, leaving Dorothy stranded in Oz with Toto, and the Wizard has vanished beyond the clouds, Dorothy, despite her disillusionment and remorse, absolves the Wizard and forgives him. She says that, after all, he was a good man, even though he was truly a bad Wizard. She does this with the thoughtful justification that "he had done his best." Thus, Dorothy -- wise child -- helps sort out the category confusion by intuitively grasping that, whereas, in ethics, intention is central to our judgment of what is good and what is not and must be taken into account, in the realm of action we weigh results, quite apart from intention. Wanting to do well does not carry the same weight as wanting to do good.
Another philosophical theme: Dorothy's three friends, as we realize almost from the start of their journey, possess unawares the boons they seek from Oz. By employing this conceit -- the "brainless" Scarecrow, for example, turns out to be the one who conceives the ingenious idea of chopping down a tree to make a bridge across the gulf they must cross in order to escape the ferocious Kalidahs -- Baum asks us to ponder the value of self-knowledge and self-awareness. He makes us reflect on the relevance of these capacities in education and in other spheres of life and, indeed, in any pilgrimage that can be conceived as an adventure along a yellow brick road. He treats here, in his way, the theme made famous by Eliot's luminous lines from The Four Quartets, penned over forty years later: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."
Dorothy's direct interactions with the Wicked Witch also prove highly instructive. Seeing the mark made by the protective kiss on her forehead, the Witch backs off, for, as Baum writes, the Power of Good is greater than the Power of Evil. But, undaunted in her malevolence, the Witch persists with her scheming and cleverly concludes that, since Dorothy does not know how to use her power, or even understand that she has power, she can still be enslaved. Once again Baum opens our eyes to the tremendous value of self-knowledge. The narrative circles back again and again to the ancient Greek adage, thought to have been inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself." And reflecting on that, we perceive its intimate connection with the problem of identity and with, therefore, the ship of Theseus.
The question of merit, and the meaning of merit, also echoes throughout Oz. After the friends reach the Emerald City at last, the Wizard asks Dorothy why he should help her, and she answers touchingly: "Because you are strong and I am weak; because you are a Great Wizard and I am only a helpless little girl." These words ring with the logic of youth -- a small child, by virtue of her being, deserves nurturance, protection, and gratification. Babies are unconditionally loved. We ask nothing of them. Yet as they grow older, rules ensue, and merit rears its head. "In this country," the Wizard replies to Dorothy, "everyone must pay for everything he gets." Similarly, to the Scarecrow, he repeats, "I never grant favors without some return." These interviews occur, moreover, at the precise midpoint of the book. They highlight a significant milestone in the learning process.
It may be too much to hope that a new movie of Oz directed by Sam Raimi will try to convey any of this intellectual richness. Yet beyond spreading color, invention, and enchantment, L. Frank Baum's masterpiece remains a literary work that inspires children to think; its well-worn printed pages and its quaint pictures open onto serious and expansive vistas of mental excursion.
Ellen Handler Spitz is the Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her latest book is Illuminating Childhood.
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