“It seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty,” Milo thinks glumly on page 2. Milo is The Phantom Tollbooth ’s blankly sensible boy hero whose boredom kicks the story off-boredom or clinical depression, depending on how you read it. I started thinking about Milo this past March.
Physical contact with other people was scarce, and I didn’t want to write anything or even read for many months. Both Juster and the legendary Maurice Sendak found success during a moment in American children’s book publishing of risk-taking, when “kiddie books” were at the bottom of the prestige totem pole and authors felt unburdened by expectations-this according to Sendak, as suggested in his 1996 written appreciation of Tollbooth. Juster eventually left New York for Massachusetts, where he lived out the rest of his days.
Ironically, his fantasy’s philosophical demons emerged in the forms of empty consumerism, bureaucracy, and crowded spaces. A trained architect, Juster crafted his famous tale of visual poetry and linguistic acrobatics in 1950s Brooklyn, after submitting a grant to write a children’s book about urban aesthetics and how kids experience cities. Norton Juster died at the age of ninety-one in early March of this year. Despite my relative safety, I was listless and frightened most hours of most days. I got off easy compared to the millions who contracted the virus, including my grandmother, who died of it, and my best friend, who is still suffering from a host of “long-haul” symptoms one year later. I live in Los Angeles, but I spent most of the pandemic cloistered in upstate New York, watching the seasons change anxiously. A book about a boy who learns to notice “that the tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a deep rich green.” A book that feels good to read right now, especially, as in the United States the worst health crisis of our generation has slowly begun to improve with the advent of a vaccine following a year of fright and loneliness. This is a spring book: a book that needs windows thrown open and breezes making the curtains dance and birds twittering like mad. I tried to write about Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth on a gray day when April curled its toes back under the covers and a March chill rattled the bones of my house.
0 kommentar(er)
