The road to Dictionopolis

Norton Juster, author of "The Phantom Tollbooth," talks about infinity, romantic triangles and just where that mysterious package came from.

By Laura Miller

Mar 12, 2001 | When you're a kid, the authors of your favorite books seem superhuman and remote. They lived long ago, like Louisa May Alcott, or far away, like A.A. Milne. Either way, it was hard to believe that these Olympian beings, capable of inventing worlds and characters so immediately, so powerfully real, could possibly be regular people, just like your parents and teachers. Then one day, you find yourself walking past the Books of Wonder children's bookstore in Manhattan (worth a visit when you're in town) and you spot a sign in the window. Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer will be autographing copies of their books, including the immortal 1961 classic, "The Phantom Tollbooth."

Whoa. You mean Norton Juster -- creator of Milo, the boy who one day receives the mysterious gift of an assembly-required toy turnpike tollbooth and magically enters the Lands Beyond, where he embarks on a quest to rescue the maidens Rhyme and Reason from exile and thereby reconcile the estranged kingdoms of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis -- that Norton Juster, walks among us mortals? If you're lucky, you've become a literary journalist, and you can invite Juster, an architect and retired teacher who lives in Massachusetts, to come by your office for an interview. And if you are indeed that lucky, you'll find him to be a robust 72, definitely a regular guy, but nevertheless as warm and witty as you could ever hope.

How did you wind up writing "The Phantom Tollbooth"?

I submitted a grant to do a children's book about urban aesthetics, how you experience and use cities. In six months I was up to my neck in 3-by-5 cards and I realized I was not really enjoying myself. I took a break to visit some friends at the beach and to take my mind off of it, and I began doing what I thought was a little story, going nowhere, just to clear my head. It just kept going.

When I had about 50 pages a friend took it to Random House, and they liked it and offered me a contract to finish the book, which really depressed me because it was no longer a game.

That's funny because one of the scariest characters in "The Phantom Tollbooth" is the Terrible Trivium, a very elegant gentleman with no face at all. His motto is that "there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing."

Exactly. Someone I've known from childhood says that I can sit at my desk with something real to do and realize that I have to straighten out the paper clips, or there's something happening out the window, or a shopping list that has to be compiled. There's always something. Everyone has that kind of demon in their life; though, like all of the demons in "The Phantom Tollbooth," it's also very particular to me.

Yet it's ironic that something you started in order to avoid doing something else turned out to be such a remarkable achievement.

The secret, at least in my life, is that if you want to do something you have to do something else to get away from that and that's the thing that turns out to be worthwhile -- whatever you're doing to escape from doing what you're supposed to be doing.

One of the things that seems to really strike a chord with people in "The Phantom Tollbooth" is Milo's state of mind at the book's beginning: "When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him -- least of all the things that should have." I suspect that the first thing people today would say about Milo is that he's depressed.

That was a problem I had back then, too. Milo's not a dysfunctional kid. He's very typical. I kept having to rewrite those sections because I didn't want him to come across as someone who had these deep psychological problems. He just couldn't figure out why he was being oppressed by all these things. When you think about it, kids get an extraordinary number of facts thrown at them, and nothing connects with anything else. As you get older, all these threads begin to appear, and you realize that almost everything you come across connects to six other things that you know about.

Kids don't know this. You give them a date, or a historical figure, or some fact in math or science and that's it. They're just disembodied things that don't mean anything. Milo doesn't know where he fits in any of this and why he has to learn all of it.

When the book first came out in the early '60s, the revealed wisdom was that you could not give kids anything to read beyond what they knew already. There were vocabulary lists. Lord help you if you put words in a book for ages 6 to 8, or 8 to 10 that they felt a child of that age couldn't understand. They also thought that fantasy was very bad for children because it disoriented them. It's changed somewhat for the better. The publishers told me that they had great misgivings because they thought that the book was too far beyond children.

But I've found in my travels, talking with kids, that they like the story and if a story is compelling for them, they'll get by any difficulty. They'll get involved with something that interests them. I think that's the great secret; it's being interesting rather than sticking to those artificial standards that they set up.

Next Page: Those wonderful, unanswerable children's questions

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