It’s quite an interesting situation to be in, to have your childhood nostalgia repackaged and remarketed to you as a twenty-something reader. It’s not even an authentic nostalgia, as a kid I wasn’t really much of a fan of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I liked it, sure, but I wasn’t obsessed. (Tintin, Commander Keen, medical dictionaries, Corey Feldman – now those were my obsessions.) I know that Sendak’s iconic picture book holds a unique status among my generation but I’m not sure how much of that stems from reading it as a kid or rediscovering it as a slightly older than the targeted age group. With the release of the film version last year, Dave Eggers, who also collaborated on the screenplay, wrote a novelization, The Wild Things, of his film script based on Sendak’s picture book.
When considering the figures involved in the film and associated products, this book included, it’s not hard to see who was the real market: film directed by Spike Jonze, known for his cult films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and music videos, co-written by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius fame and soundtracked by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Is it as simple as pulling together a few generational icons to repackage a cultural artefact to an older market?
One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are one part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
The Wild Things introduces us, once again, to Max, a product of divorce and television, trying to adapt to his mother’s new boyfriend and his older sister’s change in attitude. This first section of the novel returns us to the boredom of childhood, of being slightly outside understanding and being of the adult world. Max doesn’t fully comprehend the world outside of what it means for him, considering things only so far as according to how they effect him. In a plain, yet engaging, style, Eggers captures the focus and energy of beiing a kid, the moments of great certainty, as well as frightening uncertainty.
Max misbehaves. He floods his sister’s bedroom as revenge for ruining his igloo. He bites his mother for trying to control him. And then he runs away, and after many days and many nights of sailing, finds himself in a land among the wild things. I do like that Eggers doesn’t give us any explanation, that we’re left to our own devices to draw our own conclusions, if we even want to. As he claims his royal right over the group of wild things, he learns about responsibility for others, the repercussions of personal failure. It is an updated, modern fable, but – and maybe this is a sign of losing touch with my own “wild thing” – ultimately I preferred the real world aspects of the novel, the acknowledgement and exploration of the subtle trauma of being young and negotiating the world.
So he had a choice. Would he stay behind the curtain and think about things, marinate in his own confusion, or would he put on his white fur suit and howl and scratch and make it known who was boss of this house and all of the world known and unknown.
Despite Eggers’ admirably sincere writing style and his ability to capture the nuances of childhood boredom, The Wild Things reads too much like the film – both visually and the characters themselves. It is easy to be cynical about the circumstances of the novel’s production, but The Wild Things, as a novel, does seem extraneous.
