Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Perfect Picture Book I’ve been teaching Where the Wild Things Are (1963) here at Fukuoka University for over twenty-five years now, and almost every time I learn something new about how it works and enjoy it again. Maurice Sendak had some false starts making his classic book, one in 1958 called Where the Wild Horses Are, a book about an inch in height with wide pages, and then one in 1963 with the final title but fashioned too small (about the size of his Nutshell Library). And then when he’d found just the right size and title of the eventual book, he had to de-clutter the words (the text being overwritten) and pictures (the initial pictures having too many objects and details). Anyway, he did finally make a perfect picture book. In the compact and potent story Max is wearing his “wolf suit” pajamas and going violently crazy at home (torturing his stuffed animal bear, hammering a nail in the wall to hang a string to make a blanket lair, chasing his dog down the stairs with a large fork, threatening to eat his mother up, etc.), so his mother calls him, “WILD THING!” and sends him to bed without supper, whereupon his bedroom changes into a forest and an ocean, and he sails off in a boat to Where the Wild Things Are, where he tames the monsters and becomes their king and plays with them, until he finally is sated and realizes he misses someone who loved him most of all and returns to his bedroom to find his supper waiting for him. To tell that story, the pictures and words do interesting things, separately and together. Sometimes the words add details absent from the pictures, like Max’ mother, whom Sendak never draws. One sentence goes on for about eight pages! But he uses “and” skillfully and ends each page at a pause-able point so as to make it easy and fun to read the book aloud. There’s even a neat touch whereby he puts the time words when Max travels to Where the Wild Things Are in an order increasing from small to large (night, day, weeks, year) only to reverse them (year, weeks, day, night) when his hero returns home, giving the impression of time travel (though then how is one to explain the full moon in his bedroom window at the end of the story when it began with a crescent moon?). Sometimes the pictures add details absent from the words, like the nature of Max’ mischief, the picture on the wall of a wild thing that Max has drawn, the presence of the moon throughout, the way the moon changes size to match Max’ changing moods, the items in his supper, the diverse and chimerical composition of the wild things, and so on. Sometimes the illustrations provide a pleasing balance or symmetry, as when Max and the wild thing with human feet are sitting like mirror images in the same pose. Sendak’s extensive cross-hatching makes the pictures solid and substantial but also dreamlike and nocturnal. Sometimes the words and pictures work together, as when Max is “lonely,” and the picture shows his melancholy face. Sometimes the words and pictures work against each other, as when “mischief” seems an understatement for the mayhem Max is unleashing, and when “terrible” repeatedly describes the wild things, but they look more silly or cute or ugly. Sendak also cleverly uses layout, as in the way the pictures at first appear on the right hand pages with big white margins around them, while the words at first appear on the left hand pages, but as Max’ wildness grows, the pictures grow across the pages as the words and margins retreat, until in the wild rumpus climax there are three consecutive wonderful wordless two-page spreads where the pictures go from edge to edge (it is now that the moon is finally full, too). Then after Max expresses his wildness and fulfills and exhausts himself, the pictures start retreating as the words start advancing, till the last page has no image at all but only the words, “and it was still hot.” A wonderful touch to represent the degree of Max’s wildness by the presence or absence of words (more civilized) and pictures (more primitive). It must be so fun for kids to read a story in which the little boy hero goes wild at home, escapes punishment by journeying to his ideal wild play place, takes command of giants like grotesque adults, gives them the punishment his mother has given him by sending them to bed without their supper, then returns home to his own still hot supper comprised of soup, milk, and cake. (The themes on using fantasy to express one’s anger and resentment and frustration are great.) And although in the last picture he has pulled down his wolf suit head to reveal his good boy’s head, he is still wearing the wolf suit, and he can go wild again any time, and the moon is full, and the wild thing on the cover is waiting for him. Finally, I’m impressed by Sendak’s emotional restraint in the book, which is unsentimental. Imagine if at the end, instead of the brilliant last blank white page bearing only the words, “and it was still hot,” Sendak had, for instance, forced on us a picture of Max and his mother hugging or of Max’s mother watching her son eating! (Contrast that with the ending of the 2009 movie.) This year the book is sixty, but it never feels old. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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