Monday, July 11, 2005

Read "The Great Switcheroo" and you'll see what I mean

Margaret Talbot has a nice essay about Roald Dahl in this week's New Yorker. She writes that while kids devour his stuff, it puts many adults off—the children's books, anyway. "Dahl’s books regularly show up on the American Library Association’s list of titles that patrons ask to be restricted from young children or removed from the shelves," she writes. Indeed, his stories were often lurid, violent, and eccentric. But that's exactly why kids like them, Talbot says. Virtuous children fight—and win—the good fight, and rotten grownups always get theirs in the end.

Most of Dahl's early stories were for adults, Talbot writes, and while The New Yorker accepted a few early in his career their popularity soon waned. "Dahl's adult stories were crisply, shiveringly enjoyable—rather like "Twilight Zone" episodes—but they showed little compassion or psychological penetration. It was children, it seemed, not adults, on whom Dahl could lavish empathy."

True, they don't brim with benevolence. In one, "Lamb to the Slaughter," a lady gives her disagreeable husband the quietus with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks and serves it to the cops who come to investigate the murder. But again, that nastiness is Dahl's charm. He could be viciously funny or deliciously droll, and his perceptions were dead-on. I've always remembered this description from "The Way Up to Heaven": "The chauffeur, a man with a small rebellious Irish mouth, didn't care very much for any of this..." And the stories in Switch Bitch, incidentally, are downright scandalous. The two books that make up his memoirs, Boy and Going Solo, bridge the kid-adult gap nicely. No questionable content, lots of exciting accounts from his days as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, and the underlying sweetness of his worldview—his pro-underdog sentiments, his intense love of family—shines through on every page.

Thoughts?

--Katie

4 comments:

  1. hello again, cmcdougall. well, yes, it is an interesting point, if you allow that he really was more sympathetic to children. but he does, as you suggest, empathize with adults -- the weirder, not-so-happy ones. his characters only kill spouses who are terribly annoying and/or mean, after all-- and they get away with it, too.

    i'll have to read up on this nelson algren fellow.

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  2. ah, don't you ever feel that everyone is just a stock character in YOUR life? there's something pleasurable about a story that indulges that self-centeredness. come to that, there's something CHILDISH about that perspective, too. hey! maybe we've hit on something about old roald here ...

    but you're right, the best thing a writer can do is make his characters full, real people. i always like a good anti-hero. have you ever read mary gaitskill's stories? her folks are always sincerely messed up, and while she gives them backstories and reasons -- childhood abuse, punishing parents -- she never gives them excuses. she just prizes them open and shows us a maggoty intersection. that can make for rough reading, though. "the girl on the plane" is about someone who was involved in a gang rape as a young man, and damned if it isn't hard to relate to that dude. GOD that story is hard to read. food for thought: is it reasonable to expect the characters in our reading to be people we'd want to have a beer with, as they say? or should we sometimes detach ourselves for novels that read like human anatomy lessons? or...does a good writer aim for a middle ground?

    --katie

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  3. ray carver always breaks my heart, though, and gaitskill sometimes just turns my stomach. (her novel, "two girls fat and thin" is stronger than her stories in that it uses humor to make us feel her people's humanity.) i assume you're thinking of "so much water so close to home." somehow i think that's less of a highsmith-esque portrait-of-a-psycho piece than it is a normal-people-do-effed-up-things, who-knows-why, come-on-feel-the-noise moment.

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  4. "tell the women we're going." that's the one i meant. -- Katie

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