Geniuses at work

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1998 by Daria Donnelly

Nordstrom's heady era inaugurated an explosion of picture books. Thanks to her we can now buy or borrow heaps of wonderful books - unless we can't find them in the thicket of ephemeral books dolled up by eye-popping (but static!) pictures made possible by new printing technologies. Into this surfeited scene, Ungerer's Flix boldly reasserts the momentousness of the well-crafted picture book, telling the story of a dog born to cat parents, who lives with increasing comfort in both cultures, campaigns for mutual respect between dogs and cats, and who, after marrying a French poodle (an exchange student at Flix's university), becomes the delighted father of a kitten. Flix is a very funny book, with unbelievably droll pictures, low jokes, and visual puns like the statue of Saint Bernard - yes, the breed - in Dog City Cathedral. Flix's true subject? Quotidian cruelty and decency, human solitude, the transforming power of love, as understood by an artist courageous and loving enough to describe the human condition to little ones. It is good to have this sophisticated believer in the moral intelligence of children back among us.

There are many more great new books, but let me just mention in closing three for older readers. Peg Kehret's Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio (Albert Whitman, $14.95,179 pp.) is a plain-style account of twelve-year-old Kehret's paralyzing affliction with polio in 1949, and her painful recovery of movement and ability to walk. There are a million life lessons in the book (both for parents and children) and not one maudlin line. Teen-agers and adults, gird yourself for the forthcoming conclusion to Philip Pullman's fantastical His Dark Materials trilogy, by reading or rereading The Golden Compass (Knopf, $20,399 pp.) and The Subtle Knife (Knopf, $20,326 pp.). It looks like Lyra Belacqua and her companion Will Parry, questing and hunted travelers between worlds and times, are going to replay the Fall of Man. These amazing novels almost persuade me that, in the modern world, blasphemy may be the most potent mode of asserting and wrestling with belief in God.

Daria Donnelly will be writing regularly on children's books for Commonweal.