Eloise lives! or The reports of Stuart Little's death have been greatly exaggerated

I wasn't planning on reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, anyway, so Walter Kirn's review in Sunday's NYT didn't talk me out of it.  Besides, the Atlantic's B.J. Myers got to me first.

But since I haven't read it I don't know if Kirn's review, or Myers', is spot on or misses wide by a mile.

There was one passage in Kirn's review, though, that struck me as definitely wrong, not because of what it said about Foer's novel, but what it asserted about works by E.B. White and Kay Thompson.  The italics in the following quote are mine.

Oskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. He's a cross between J. D. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books whose restless high spirits and social confidence get them into funny predicaments while their preoccupied but loving parents conduct their mysterious offstage grown-up business - business that they'll come home from just in time to save their offspring from real trouble.

Which is pretty much how things go in Foer's novel. A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely. Foer chose this quaint template for an ingenious reason: it evokes, at a primal cultural level, the benevolent, innocent New York that was vaporized, even as a fantasy, when the towers were toppled. Not all the victims, Foer knows, were real, live people. Eloise and Stuart Little died, too.

Yes, and as you know, the Black Death killed off fairy tales, Mole, Ratty, Badger, and Toad died in the trenches of World War I, the Blitz marked the end of Pooh, and the Cat in the Hat didn't make it out of Vietnam.

I didn't like it at the time and I like it even less now after Abu Ghraib, this notion that we were all somehow so innocent on September 10, 2001.

It seems a pretty stupid idea that a nation founded on slavery and expanded through an attempt to exterminate the Indians, that slaughtered three quarters of a million of its own people in a horrific civil war, that firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, and obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that sent its soldiers to massacre the people of My Lai and dropped napalm on children had any innocence to lose.

Kirn would probably argue, justly, that he didn't mean our literal innocence but our illusion of innocence was vaporized on 9/11.

If it was, the evidence is pretty strong that as a nation we re-illusioned ourselves practically overnight.

Nevermind that   What he is says about Eloise and Stuart Little suggests that New Yorkers acted contrary to human nature and, with the sad wisdom and cruelty that comes from lost innocence, shut up all their children's books, stood their kids at the window, pointed to the smoke rising up from Ground Zero, and said, "Jane, Michael, we're sorry, but all those lovely stories we used to tell you aren't true.  That's the world you live in now.  Get used to it!"

Much more likely what happend is that in children's bedrooms all over New York---all over the country---Stuart and Eloise became more alive than ever, as parents tried to reassure and comfort their children that they were safe and the world was still a good place.

That's what children's stories do.

They aren't escapes from reality.  They help children understand it and cope with it.  The world in children's stories is scary, full of monsters, ogres, dragons, and other adults intent on doing you and themselves harm.  But there are also fairies and good witches and wizards, knights in shining armor, nice doormen, friendly telephone repairmen, and other adults who are there to help you, and with their help and your own pluck and effort and brains, you can get through almost any trouble and sorrow.

If Stuart and Eloise couldn't survive 9/11 then how in the name of J.M. Barrie did Peter Pan survive World War I?  We lost around 3000 people on September 11th.  The British lost over 19,000 during the first day of the battle of the Somme.  But not only is Pan alive on screen and onstage and in Johnny Depp's Oscar nomination, he's alive in Kirn's own review.  At Kirn's beckoning, he flies in at the end of the review to help nail down Kirn's point.

This is when the novel's ideal reader is meant to riffle through the flip-book, while Oskar riffles through it in the story, and let himself, for one Peter Pan-ish moment, imagine how incredible that would be. Sept. 11 would never have happened!

Yes, Mr Kirn, Imagine how it would be if 9/11 never happened.

If New York was a beautiful and safe place in which people did not die.

Where a little girl could live all on her own in the Plaza Hotel.

And a normal human family could have a sailboat-racing, car-driving, adventure-seeking mouse for a child.

Comments

[harry near indy]

excuse me, professor and all other readers, but didn't we -- that is, the united states -- lose our innocence when jfk was assassinated?

jeebus h cripes, but i feel angry when some fool says that.

[Doug]

wonderful post, thank you. I grew up in apartheid-era South Africa where innocence didn't much outlast the dawn of consciousness, but I still read the stories to my children. Stuart Little is a deeply strange book, it unnerves me, but I do love Mole and his compatriots.

Those who think America 'lost its innocence' on 9/11 are naive and parochial fabulists, as blind as Mole but a deal less agreeable.

[Linkmeister]

Apparently GWB was still innocent, judging from his reading material that morning. Baaaah!

[Bill Altreuter]

Right on, Lance! You and I have chatted about children's books before-- my kids believe in the New York City of "The Saturdays", and the England of E. Nesbit, and they know about the trail of Tears, too.

[blue girl]

I did have this little sneaky feeling when all of our media and 1/2 of the government were obsessing over Clinton's sexual activities -- every day, on TV, in prime time -- that something more important might be going on -- that maybe we were "about" to lose our innocence.

I have that same feeling now.

[blue girl]

....and another thing! It was pretty hard for a 9 year old to hold on to his innocence when you'd turn the TV on and hear Katie Couric reading the Starr Report every morning....

[j. bryant]

I wonder whose innocence is always being proclaimed? Perhaps it's our Administration's. That way there is a great excuse for having ignored all the signs leading up to 9/11 - along with saying the U.S. was no longer going to participate in the peace process for the Middle East - and even ignoring any hopes of a treaty to keep North Korea from producing nuclear weapons.

I guess they didn't know how bad the bad guys really were. They thought they could concentrate on syphoning off as much money as possible while picking and choosing which enemy we wanted to pay attention to (would it be too cynical to say - which one we could get the most money out of? Maybe that wasn't it - let's cling to THAT innocence.)

Of course, once they found out, that meant the U.S. could throw out the rules of the Geneva Convention or, heck, the Constitution. I wonder what kind of enemy we were supposed to be facing before 9/11. As you said, we don't have to look far to see what man is capable of, Pogo. But where is the surprise in those we've fought? I heard of kamikaze fliers long before suicide bombers, "The Rape of Nanking" portrays a pretty brutal enemy, I know the Germans were very sterile about it but they seemed to have broken a lot of rules of humanity to me - and that's just WWII. To our shame we ignored the war in Rwanda but after reading about a father willing to make an example of his sons by killing them because they were half Tutsi, well, that genocide could take all shreds of anyone's innocence away...And yet, there are still the lines of Anne Frank's "despite everything...I still believe in the inner goodness of man."

I'm sorry - I think I am going way off topic on a rant you inspired....

So, along with the absurdity of the comments you mentioned, what about the destruction of children's innocence after school shootings like Columbine? When they can't even feel safe in their school hanging out with other students? If that's how it works, it seems like that would finish off some childhood fantasy figures pretty quickly on its own.