series of unfortunate mediocrity
0 Comments Published by ginny on Monday, January 8, 2001 at 10:57 PM.
5:57 p.m. 2001-05-27
I've read the first of those Series of Unfortunate Events books, The Bad Beginning, by "Lemony Snicket." They're touted for being in the tradition of Gorey and Dahl, and being original. They're about three children to whom nothing good ever happens. No happy beginnings, no happy endings, and not much happy in the middle, as the author puts it. They're funny. Yes. Especially the first fifteen or so pages. I laughed a lot during them. But you know, beyond that, I don't think it was a very good book.
Now I'm not talking morals or aesthetics here. That's undoubtedly what proponents of the books or the author himself would accuse me of -- objecting on grounds of "kids shouldn't read depressing books" or "happy endings are what make children's books," or something. But I don't believe that. That is bunk. The thing is, though, I've read a love the people who are this author's obvious influences, and I think he's misinterpreted them entirely.
We'll start with the originality question. These books like to think they're original. In most children's books, they claim, good things happen to good little children. Well, not in these. In these books, miserable things happen to them. Awful things.
Except that that's not in the least original. Hark back to even early fairy tales (which aren't for children, but for everyone, of course), and truly terrible things happen to children. Their parents die. Their guardians are abusive. They're eaten by bears and turned into toads. They have to spend twenty-five years living in the woods with not a single soul to talk to and a curse on them. Moving forward, modern children's literature -- that is, the good stuff -- carries with it the same thing. Roald Dahl is, of course, the best example: in his books no child is safe. Most adults are, at their very gentlest, bullies, and at their worst, monsters (even quite literally -- think The Witches). And even the good adults seem helpless and totally inefficient in the face of the world’s villainy. The good grandmother in The Witches is old and can’t get around (and the boy is still turned into a mouse at the end). Miss Honey in Matilda is deeply sweet, but can’t do a thing to stop either Miss Trunchbull or Matilda’s parents, even when she tries. It’s up to the heroic Matilda to do it all.
I would posit, in fact, that you can’t have good children’s literature (not to mention good non-children’s literature) without something at least mildly uncomfortable happening to the protagonists. That’s what motivates a situation, after all. It’s called establishing conflict. And a very good way to both establish a compelling conflict and get the readers thoroughly on the side of your protagonists is to have people doing monstrous, unjustifiable things to them, just because they have the power. Especially if you are writing a children’s book. Because something all children feel during their childhoods is that the world is being distinctly unfair to them and pushing them around just because they’re small. Making them do things or act ways or give up things just because they’re kids. And sometimes they’re right, too. Frances Hodgesen Burnett knew that. Read A Little Princess.
But the point is this: horrible things happening to children are a commonplace, if not a virtual necessity, of children’s writing.
So what, then, makes these books different? Because they are different. The feeling I get reading The Bad Beginning isn’t remotely similar to the feeling I get reading The BFG. The difference is twofold: the narratorial tone and the ending. First: the tone.
The thing that makes Roald Dahl’s books so wonderful – and so subversive – is, I think, that the children fight back. The marvelous thing here is that, despite the clear corruption of the world around them, these little people manage to use their wits to outsmart the bad guys, and come out pretty much on top in the end. These books are revenge for the unfairness of the world. More important than their stories is the fact that it’s the kids who are the heroes, and the smart ones here. The fact that the story, and the readers, are on their side, if the world is against them. The books themselves are part of the fight – against unfairness, against violence and brutality, and against unhappy endings. We know these stories aren’t real. But at least for a little while we’ve fought the badness of the world (the real world, in which bad things do happen to children), and seen that somebody else saw through it too. It’s no accident that some of Roald Dahl’s childhood was profoundly unhappy. I think his books are, in some ways, a way to fight back against that unhappiness.
But The Bad Beginning is not the same. It is not on the children’s side. More importantly, they are not empowered. The language and the narration both disempower the main characters, I think. Though the narrator pretends to have sympathy for the children, it is, in reality, he who makes the events seem so unfortunate. As I’ve pointed out, the things that happen to the Baudelaire children aren’t actually so unusual in the world of children’s fiction. Writing them and even dwelling on them is a perfectly well-tried method of writing for children. What The Bad Beginning does, however, is to write them in such a way that the children are taken almost completely out of power, both in terms of speech and action, and the reader is, instead, given narrator commentary on how bad this event is and how horrible the children feel. When they act plucky (as they must do, since this is a supposed parody of children’s fiction), they seem ridiculous. You may with the Baudelaire children (and I think you do – this isn’t badly written fiction), but you can’t really respect them. And nor do you feel, most of the time, as if they have any agency whatsoever. Roald Dahl’s empowering style has been deprived of its empowerment here, and what is left is, precisely, “a series of unfortunate events.”
So what do we have? A bad beginning, and a bad ending too. Let’s tackle the ending now. And with it, the other influence I see strongly represented in this book: Edward Gorey. Now, I’m a huge Goreyophile. And I see, in The Bad Beginning, a lot of things that remind me of him. I’m especially reminded of one of my favorites, “The Unfortunate Child,” which is a direct parody of A Little Princess and its sister tales, and wonderful. It makes me laugh and laugh, and I don’t mind at all that the ending is completely bleak. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But, again, I maintain that The Bad Beginning is different. Crucially. Because what this author has written is not, in fact, a direct parody, but a novel. A children’s book. Not an illustrated, almost erudite macabre fantasy, but a fully developed story. With characters and narrator and even more books following it. And what he does in those books is make the children both likeable and accessible to identification. He goes to pretty great lengths to make you at least feel sorry for the Baudelaire children, and probably feel what they’re going through. Which is good. Except that then he trashes them.
The thing that makes “The Unfortunate Child” easy to laugh at is that there’s no opportunity to develop identification with or feelings for the unfortunate child herself. She’s a sketched-in literary concept, not a person. You don’t know anything about her, and she really seems pretty annoyingly moony. You’re gleeful when she finally gets run over (by her own unknowing father), because you can be. You’ve nothing to suggest that you ought to really feel sorry for this child – because she isn’t really a child. She’s a nightmare or a fiction. (Although, of course, Gorey’s deeper point is always, like Dahl’s, that the world is really and truly a scary awful place – a terrible truth, and one that make their books even better). But the Baudelaire children are not like the Unfortunate Child. They have names and personalities and really nothing not to recommend them. You like these kids. They’re not wishy-washy or sentimental or unspeakably good. They’re pretty normal, if a bit over-achieving. You don’t want to get revenge on them or seem them get their comeuppance – you truly feel that they don’t deserve anything they get in the least.
And that’s a problem. Because if you’re going to have bad things happen to children and keep them that way you have to a) make this a “true-story” sort of thing, where all the factors of reality operate (like child protection laws, for instance) – see The Great Gilly Hopkins for this – in which case it’s usually either a “young adult novel,” (which I hate) or not really a children’s book at all, or b) make it so the readers can feel entertained by the ending without feeling guilty about being entertained by it. And The Bad Beginning is neither. Some of the unfortunate events which happen are extremely improbable, if this is a real-world universe (which it clearly isn’t) and the dark satire that’s the wonderful part of Gorey’s work isn’t really present.
I’m afraid what we’re left with is pretty much a cheap trick. A series of books which gratify people’s urges to be seen as cynical, without being particularly entertaining or possessing much literary value. They make you feel bad – and bad about feeling bad – and then make you want to pretend you love them because you’re cool like that. Which is, in my opinion, stupid. I can only hope, really, that they don’t continue to be as big as they have been. I’d love to leave room for some really good children’s literature to get big on the market. Literature that isn’t worried about being too cool for itself. As Bell Hooks said when I went to hear her talk, “cynicism is not revolution.” I think maybe Mr. Snicket might need to repeat that to himself a couple hundred times.
I've read the first of those Series of Unfortunate Events books, The Bad Beginning, by "Lemony Snicket." They're touted for being in the tradition of Gorey and Dahl, and being original. They're about three children to whom nothing good ever happens. No happy beginnings, no happy endings, and not much happy in the middle, as the author puts it. They're funny. Yes. Especially the first fifteen or so pages. I laughed a lot during them. But you know, beyond that, I don't think it was a very good book.
Now I'm not talking morals or aesthetics here. That's undoubtedly what proponents of the books or the author himself would accuse me of -- objecting on grounds of "kids shouldn't read depressing books" or "happy endings are what make children's books," or something. But I don't believe that. That is bunk. The thing is, though, I've read a love the people who are this author's obvious influences, and I think he's misinterpreted them entirely.
We'll start with the originality question. These books like to think they're original. In most children's books, they claim, good things happen to good little children. Well, not in these. In these books, miserable things happen to them. Awful things.
Except that that's not in the least original. Hark back to even early fairy tales (which aren't for children, but for everyone, of course), and truly terrible things happen to children. Their parents die. Their guardians are abusive. They're eaten by bears and turned into toads. They have to spend twenty-five years living in the woods with not a single soul to talk to and a curse on them. Moving forward, modern children's literature -- that is, the good stuff -- carries with it the same thing. Roald Dahl is, of course, the best example: in his books no child is safe. Most adults are, at their very gentlest, bullies, and at their worst, monsters (even quite literally -- think The Witches). And even the good adults seem helpless and totally inefficient in the face of the world’s villainy. The good grandmother in The Witches is old and can’t get around (and the boy is still turned into a mouse at the end). Miss Honey in Matilda is deeply sweet, but can’t do a thing to stop either Miss Trunchbull or Matilda’s parents, even when she tries. It’s up to the heroic Matilda to do it all.
I would posit, in fact, that you can’t have good children’s literature (not to mention good non-children’s literature) without something at least mildly uncomfortable happening to the protagonists. That’s what motivates a situation, after all. It’s called establishing conflict. And a very good way to both establish a compelling conflict and get the readers thoroughly on the side of your protagonists is to have people doing monstrous, unjustifiable things to them, just because they have the power. Especially if you are writing a children’s book. Because something all children feel during their childhoods is that the world is being distinctly unfair to them and pushing them around just because they’re small. Making them do things or act ways or give up things just because they’re kids. And sometimes they’re right, too. Frances Hodgesen Burnett knew that. Read A Little Princess.
But the point is this: horrible things happening to children are a commonplace, if not a virtual necessity, of children’s writing.
So what, then, makes these books different? Because they are different. The feeling I get reading The Bad Beginning isn’t remotely similar to the feeling I get reading The BFG. The difference is twofold: the narratorial tone and the ending. First: the tone.
The thing that makes Roald Dahl’s books so wonderful – and so subversive – is, I think, that the children fight back. The marvelous thing here is that, despite the clear corruption of the world around them, these little people manage to use their wits to outsmart the bad guys, and come out pretty much on top in the end. These books are revenge for the unfairness of the world. More important than their stories is the fact that it’s the kids who are the heroes, and the smart ones here. The fact that the story, and the readers, are on their side, if the world is against them. The books themselves are part of the fight – against unfairness, against violence and brutality, and against unhappy endings. We know these stories aren’t real. But at least for a little while we’ve fought the badness of the world (the real world, in which bad things do happen to children), and seen that somebody else saw through it too. It’s no accident that some of Roald Dahl’s childhood was profoundly unhappy. I think his books are, in some ways, a way to fight back against that unhappiness.
But The Bad Beginning is not the same. It is not on the children’s side. More importantly, they are not empowered. The language and the narration both disempower the main characters, I think. Though the narrator pretends to have sympathy for the children, it is, in reality, he who makes the events seem so unfortunate. As I’ve pointed out, the things that happen to the Baudelaire children aren’t actually so unusual in the world of children’s fiction. Writing them and even dwelling on them is a perfectly well-tried method of writing for children. What The Bad Beginning does, however, is to write them in such a way that the children are taken almost completely out of power, both in terms of speech and action, and the reader is, instead, given narrator commentary on how bad this event is and how horrible the children feel. When they act plucky (as they must do, since this is a supposed parody of children’s fiction), they seem ridiculous. You may with the Baudelaire children (and I think you do – this isn’t badly written fiction), but you can’t really respect them. And nor do you feel, most of the time, as if they have any agency whatsoever. Roald Dahl’s empowering style has been deprived of its empowerment here, and what is left is, precisely, “a series of unfortunate events.”
So what do we have? A bad beginning, and a bad ending too. Let’s tackle the ending now. And with it, the other influence I see strongly represented in this book: Edward Gorey. Now, I’m a huge Goreyophile. And I see, in The Bad Beginning, a lot of things that remind me of him. I’m especially reminded of one of my favorites, “The Unfortunate Child,” which is a direct parody of A Little Princess and its sister tales, and wonderful. It makes me laugh and laugh, and I don’t mind at all that the ending is completely bleak. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But, again, I maintain that The Bad Beginning is different. Crucially. Because what this author has written is not, in fact, a direct parody, but a novel. A children’s book. Not an illustrated, almost erudite macabre fantasy, but a fully developed story. With characters and narrator and even more books following it. And what he does in those books is make the children both likeable and accessible to identification. He goes to pretty great lengths to make you at least feel sorry for the Baudelaire children, and probably feel what they’re going through. Which is good. Except that then he trashes them.
The thing that makes “The Unfortunate Child” easy to laugh at is that there’s no opportunity to develop identification with or feelings for the unfortunate child herself. She’s a sketched-in literary concept, not a person. You don’t know anything about her, and she really seems pretty annoyingly moony. You’re gleeful when she finally gets run over (by her own unknowing father), because you can be. You’ve nothing to suggest that you ought to really feel sorry for this child – because she isn’t really a child. She’s a nightmare or a fiction. (Although, of course, Gorey’s deeper point is always, like Dahl’s, that the world is really and truly a scary awful place – a terrible truth, and one that make their books even better). But the Baudelaire children are not like the Unfortunate Child. They have names and personalities and really nothing not to recommend them. You like these kids. They’re not wishy-washy or sentimental or unspeakably good. They’re pretty normal, if a bit over-achieving. You don’t want to get revenge on them or seem them get their comeuppance – you truly feel that they don’t deserve anything they get in the least.
And that’s a problem. Because if you’re going to have bad things happen to children and keep them that way you have to a) make this a “true-story” sort of thing, where all the factors of reality operate (like child protection laws, for instance) – see The Great Gilly Hopkins for this – in which case it’s usually either a “young adult novel,” (which I hate) or not really a children’s book at all, or b) make it so the readers can feel entertained by the ending without feeling guilty about being entertained by it. And The Bad Beginning is neither. Some of the unfortunate events which happen are extremely improbable, if this is a real-world universe (which it clearly isn’t) and the dark satire that’s the wonderful part of Gorey’s work isn’t really present.
I’m afraid what we’re left with is pretty much a cheap trick. A series of books which gratify people’s urges to be seen as cynical, without being particularly entertaining or possessing much literary value. They make you feel bad – and bad about feeling bad – and then make you want to pretend you love them because you’re cool like that. Which is, in my opinion, stupid. I can only hope, really, that they don’t continue to be as big as they have been. I’d love to leave room for some really good children’s literature to get big on the market. Literature that isn’t worried about being too cool for itself. As Bell Hooks said when I went to hear her talk, “cynicism is not revolution.” I think maybe Mr. Snicket might need to repeat that to himself a couple hundred times.
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