"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."--Natalie Babbit (1975) Tuck Everlasting
When my son, now almost 11, first went to school, I had to get used to the fact that he was not especially forthcoming with what happened during the day. I learned that certain directed questions might make a difference, but he quickly and repeatedly alerted me to the fact that I ask too many questions. (Another way my occupation deforms me, I thought ruefully many times.)
Since, I have been well trained to accept any information about his day from any source with gratitude. I have also learned to read signs of distress or success in oblique fashion.
I don't want to suggest that I never learn anything at all about what goes on in school. For instance, a recent book they read in class -- Peter Pan -- was deemed boring and stupid.
It is not because he dislikes reading. Our son is a voracious reader. While we are a rather bookish family, I have been, in fact, astonished by the speed with which he reads and the complexity of the material he assimilates. (Okay, I am a proud dad!) He reads so fast that he is perpetually running out of things to read. But despite the fact that he frequently faces a serious search problem, he is quite adamant that our suggestions won't do. (So, he and I most frequently bond over films and football, not books.)
The other day I was, thus, quite surprised that he recommended a book to me: Tuck Everlasting. I learned they also are reading it in class. When I asked him why he recommended it to me, his answer surprised me: it's very philosophical. But after that enticing morsel little else was forthcoming.
I had never heard of the book. And I was amazed to learn that it had sold millions and was turned into numerous feature films. I suddenly felt very sheltered. It turns out my spouse was convinced she had read it and still owned a copy. After a fruitless search, and a repeated nudging from our son to me to read it, I ordered it online and read it Saturday.
Now, nearly all books I read I encounter with a reputation attached to it. I either know the author personally or by reputation; it's a classic I should have read or a work central to debates in my field; or it's a novel I have heard about (through reviews or word or mouth) or that has been gifted to me with some kind of comment. And in writing these sentences I realized it is, in fact, incredibly rare that I read a book without any sense of what I might expect.
When I was a late teen-ager a family friend, Marion Zilversmit, gave me a paperback copy of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I am not sure whether it was for my birthday or a goodbye gift for my departure for college Stateside. For some reason I did not read it initially. And so it stayed in my room in Amsterdam, where I found it after I returned my freshman year. I took it with me in a backpack following the Dutch team around Italy for the world cup in 1990.
After the (horrible) game against England in Cagliari, where all fans were treated as dangerous animals -- the police used tear-gas indiscriminately --, I found myself alone on the deck of a freight boat returning some of us to Palermo. The fans were packed in and the boat reeked of alcohol and piss. I found a spot on the upper deck, and started reading Auster through the night under the mediterranean sky. When I look back on it, I only see the romance because Auster took me into a vastly more fascinating and stimulating world than the one I was sailing; the smell and disgust are evaporated.
The first major surprise of Tuck Everlasting is the incredibly abstract, even mythical style that is achieved at once:
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.
Yes, my brain knows that this is strictly false in the Southern hemisphere and, in some sense, unintelligible prior to the building of the first ferris wheels. But simultaneously it feels like I have just assimilated a truth eternal. This sense is heightened by the next sentence with starts with an "Often..."
After I read the book my son pointed out to me, while we were on an errand, that Babbit's descriptions are simultaneously lively ("glaring noons") and austere ("silent," "blank"); that when you read it, you have to do a lot of work imagining what's going on, but this work of imagining does not feel like work. I recognize part of the point and whisper, we co-construct the story, as it were, with the author. He squeezes my hand.
A second major surprise of my reading Tuck Everlasting is when I recognize (I hope he forgives me for sharing this) my son's recent bedtime questions to me in a passage early in Chapter 1:
The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”
At the time he did not disguise his disappointment with the inadequacy of my responses (something about local jurisprudence, scarcity, innate commitments) to his questions. I hope to do better some day.
The other day, I asked him if he wants to talk about Tuck Everlasting (which is a rather violent book). No. Did he identify with the main protagonist (also a single child around his age). No. I could tell I was risking asking too many questions. We eventually negotiated a compromise that I could write a digression about it.
That concessions feels like a pyrrhic victory here; what to say now?
You, perceptive reader, will have noticed that eternal return and heracleitan flux are key themes in Tuck Everlasting. And I don't share any spoilers if I say that the plot is accelerated by ordinary decisions about what to do with dangerous secrets that take on weight in virtue of the possibility of eternal return.
And then, as I am contemplating a post about how Frodo has to leave Middle Earth, and wondering if I have written that already, and before I realize what's happening, I recognize something else my son was telling me, but hadn't heard; if he and I both co-construct the story while reading it, there is a sense we have not read the same story at all. And while I reflect on this, I discern that asking about the version he is constructing with Babbit would be a way of grabbing illicitly what's now his.
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