In a Nutshell

Lots of picture books have come home from the library in recent days, filled with lots of glossy illustrations, lots of photographs of cute young authors who live in Brooklyn, lots of squiggly line drawings of mischievous cats or lonely dodos or curious polar bears, and reading them OlderKid and I have felt...well, frankly, lots of boredom. The stories are all fine, and they urge pleasant, respectable behavior; sharing with siblings, eating food neatly, showing respect to Mother Earth. I wouldn't quarrel a bit with them, but I just might be asleep before the final page gets turned. Which is why, after trying the fourth such glossy innocuous yawner (at my insistence, I'm sorry to say, OlderKid recognized the way things were going long before), we rushed back with relief to Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library.

If you haven't read these before, well, you're missing something, as I hope I'll make clear. The books are tiny and come in their own protective box; there are four of them; they are modeled on primers of the nineteenth-century and, in theory at least, review letters, numbers, the months of the year, and the importance of caring. But what makes them great (aside from the fact that Carole King set them to music perfectly for Really Rosie, her collaboration with Sendak), is their willingness, like every Sendak production, to delve into the terrifying and absurdist depths of a child's fears.

Picture books, like poetry, show their hand almost immediately: you can tell from the first few words usually if it's going to be "Tyger, tyger burning bright" or more "How doth the little busy bee..." And any good picture book, like any poem that's worth learning and remembering, leaves a mark. Sometimes the mark is funny, sometimes touching, but surprisingly (at least to me) most of of the time it's incredibly terrifying. Fear is probably the most powerful emotion that a 3 year old feels, and so he wants to feel it a lot, in a controlled environment where the turn of a page can bring back or banish the terrible feeling at will. If the book won't acknowledge this, or worse, passes off an adult's fear (that two siblings won't love each other instantly, say) as a child's, that book is worse than useless. (A fear that a sibling will replace a child, well, that's another matter.)

So this is what's great about Sendak. Pierre actually gets eaten by a lion because he is such a little snot. Johnny has to stand up to a robber, a tiger, and a nose-pecking blackbird, among many others. Alligators throw tantrums. These things are all scary, and fascinating, and worthy of constant repetition--and along the way there is also some talk of May follows April follows March, and so on. I think some modern parents are unsettled by this, and so reluctant to read Sendak to their children. Maybe they are afraid of the blood-thirsty enjoyment they see in their child's eyes. But the terror will inevitably out, if not via the Nutshell Library, than via Bionicles, or Power Rangers, or Batman, or what have you. And Carole King wrote no music for those.