This sorcery isn't just for kids

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," like all great escapist reading, takes you happily back to where you already were.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 31, 1999 | Two or three times a year I find myself in a reading rut. Nothing appeals to me -- not the new books I've picked up because they seemed interesting, not the classics I've always meant to read. For a constant reader (I've missed buses while scanning newsstands, rather than face a ride without something to read), that's a sort of purgatory. And more and more it's been children's literature that's been my release.

Luckily (or stupidly), I didn't read a lot of children's literature when I was a kid. Maybe that was because I became smitten by pop culture at an early age, and classic kids' lit was always presented in a way that felt utterly distant from what I liked. It all seemed to be stories of trolls and fairies (I've never fallen under the spell of Tolkien), or of terribly polite English children living in big remote houses where television and top 40 radio didn't exist.

There were exceptions. I adored "Harriet the Spy," though that seems easy enough to explain. Already loving movies (and the idea of detectives and spies), I must have recognized in Harriet a fellow voyeur. But when teachers or librarians or even classmates extolled the virtues of most kids' books, I think I expected something like the Disney movies I knew I was supposed to like more than I did. And since I've always resented authority, I bristled when anyone tried to change my reading habits, like the fifth-grade teacher who questioned my parents on whether the Ross Macdonald mysteries I was reading were -- that damnable word -- "appropriate."

So as an adult I found myself with even more reading to catch up on than most adults. And 12 years ago, during a miserable winter when my family was being visited by more than its share of sickness and death, I picked up "The Secret Garden" -- and felt as if I'd stumbled onto a secret that had been there for my discovering all along. It would be unfair to Frances Hodgson Burnett to say that I loved "The Secret Garden" (and "The Little Princess," which I read immediately after) merely because it provided a soothing escape from everything that was going on in my life. I lost myself in the book because it was first of all a great story. But finally it gave me the gift that I think marks all first-rate literature, no matter what age it's intended for: an escape that's ultimately a way back into life.

The standard line on children's literature is that to do it well you have to know how to write simply. That's not quite right. To do it well, you have to know how to write essentially. Books that are nothing more than lessons to be imparted, books that we're supposed to like because somebody has decreed them good for us, will always smack of school and duty. That's the antithesis of the only real reason anyone reads: pleasure. Kids' lit can contain lessons, meanings, messages of comfort or heralds of experiences that lie in wait for young readers. But the minute any of those things overtake narrative, the book is sunk. (Which is why William Bennett's reductive, droning insistence that the duty of literature is the impartation of virtue bears no relation to what draws us to reading in the first place or -- if we're honest with ourselves -- what keeps us reading.) Of course there are differences in scope and complexity between the work of Dickens or Hardy or Fitzgerald or Angus Wilson, and books like "The Wind in the Willows" or Roald Dahl's "Matilda" or "The Chronicles of Narnia" (which, at a friend's suggestion, got me out of one of my ruts a few years ago). But allowing for those obvious and inevitable distinctions, what separates great novelists from great children's novelists strikes me as less important than what unites them -- namely the intention of taking their readers on a journey that insists that experience can be both "very exciting and rather terrible" and "very surprising and splendid and beautiful" (to borrow descriptions from the loveliest chapter of "The Wind in the Willows").

The fullness of that sort of reading pleasure makes you greedy, reluctant to settle for writing that does less. Too much contemporary literature feels less like taking a journey than like grabbing a cup of coffee in some nondescript cafe. There seems to be a lurking embarrassment at the very notion of immersing readers in something bigger than themselves. Tom Wolfe (himself a mediocre novelist) has spent much of the last decade complaining that novelists no longer feel compelled to report on society and its institutions (which is why a novel like Richard Price's "Freedomland" feels so meaty). But I'd guess that the sense of what's lacking in contemporary literature has more to do with the emotional and imaginative limits that are the result of the quirky and personal spheres in which many fiction writers have circumscribed themselves. It's the sense of shared experience, of being swept up, that I value in children's literature. Danny DeVito's wonderful film of Dahl's "Matilda" sums it up beautifully with the message his young heroine discovers when she falls in love with books: "You are not alone."

Those words can be taken as simple comfort, or they can be taken as a deceptively simple reminder of the basic responsibility of living. Because, of course, the villains in kids' literature act as if they are alone, while the heroic beauty of the protagonists is often that, in spite of being outcasts who feel alone, they refuse that kind of selfishness. In other words, the heroes of kid's lit are fantasies of the people we hope we can be.

Next Page: That unmistakable shiver that tells you you're reading a classic

• View blog reactions