9781934781623

dark and almost suffocating, eggers novelization of the screenplay based on the classic sendek book is brilliant, but not a pick-me-up! i was, however, made continually happy by my limited-edition furry cover edition (never have i so enjoyed petting my book whilst reading it).

Maurice Sendak created a picture-book classic with his book "Where The Wild Things Are," about a young boy named Max who frolics with strange beasts. That story is merely the backbone of Dave Eggers' strange fantasy novel "The Wild Things," which tries to flesh out the story of Max and the wild things... but while he does an admirable job expanding individual characters, the plot remains as thin as ever. Max is sick of the people who surround him (a weary mother, a distant older sister, and assorted friends and neighbors) and still troubled by the divorce that left his family fragmented. So he often acts out -- throwing snowballs, drenching his sister's room, and playing pranks on his mother's dumb-grunt boyfriend. One night he puts on an old pair of wolf pajamas and goes on a rampage through his house, finally biting his mother when she tries to restrain him. Horrified, he runs out of the house and ends up trying to sail a small boat to the city where his father lives... only to end up on a strange island populated entirely by monstrous wild things. Their only interest is in in having whatever kind of highly-destructive fun they want, and Max soon joyously joins in on their rampaging... having convinced them to crown him their king. But the land of the wild things is not a safe place, and Max soon discovers that "erratic and wild" has its unpleasant side... The whole idea behind "The Wild Things" is to take Sendak's picture book and resculpt it as a novel. And David Eggers does a pretty good job fleshing it out, using Max's "everyday" life and troubled family to show why this kid would want to join up with the Wild Things. And he writes in a beautiful, slightly surreal style full of strange moments and slightly offbeat perspectives, and manages to make the dreamlike island a more "ordinary" place than the "real" world. The problem is that Eggers runs out of plot soon after Max floats off to the island. He starts off strong with Max's troublesome behavior and subsequent "running away" to the Island, but after the kid is crowned, he just loses focus of what the story should be. There's no real story after that -- just a patchwork of random, increasingly bizarre anecdotes where Max and the Wild things break houses, set fires, throw rocks, and occasionally play "war" with lava, boulders and land-jellyfish. Then the Wild Things get annoyed, somebody thinks Max looks yummy, they bicker, he distracts them with a new game, and the whole cycle starts over again. It gets very tedious, until the rather bizarre climax when he ends up in real danger. Similarly, Max and the Wild Things are handled well at first, but Eggers loses some of his magic later on. Max is convincingly and poignantly painted as an essentially good kid who is lashing out at anyone who annoys him, because of his turmoil over his parents' divorce. Similarly each Wild Thing is given their own personality -- motherly, volatile, arrogant nihilistic, and so on. The main problem is that while Max is convincingly sketched, he doesn't seem to learn anything from his island adventure except that being a wild thing is not so great. "The Wild Things" is a striking and memorable little novella that stretches the dimensions of Sendak's book, but it's flawed by too little plot and too much "rumpusing." Almost great, but it feels like the story spun out of Eggers' grasp.

I disagree with the major review at the start of these reviews list. I think this is one kind of book if it's to be read by kids 8-12 and another if it's to be read by adults or even by adults to children. What the review above failed to mentioned is that Maurice Sendak actually asked Dave Eggers to publish this novel, and to flesh out the screenplay into a complete narrative. It's clear to me why he wanted to do this. On one side, for children reading the book, it's a bit dark, psychological, and tense. I think without a parent to mitigate and dampen the effect of the Wild Things' more wild inclinations (wanting to eat what makes them unhappy), I think the book might be a bit overwhelming for the a few 8-12 year olds. I can imagine that it would, however, tickle the minds of many. This isn't a typical children's story, and it doesn't aim to be, just like the original. It's about complicated childhood drama, and the feelings so many of us have when we want to run away as children. It's about that very real feeling that even in the places we love, we can feel alone, scared, and even betrayed. This sometimes, or in my experience with kids of this age group, leads us to do regrettable, childish things--run away for an evening, hide somewhere for a prolonged period of time, knock stuff over, yell, essentially misbehave. As if the dissolving of structure and certainty makes us want to return somewhere wild, and that's exactly what Max does, and what many of us have done. But the Wild place is wild for a reason, and I think the idea of the Wild Things Island is so extensive, and painted so broad and perfectly, that it also offers glimpse of our adult wildness, our fears, our excitements, our uncontrolled and bestial tendencies that are sudden jolts of rebellion from the world we create for ourselves. So, on the other hand, in the large sense, I thought this book was really about growing up, about accepting responsibility, and more keenly for children, about parenting. If read to a child, this book gives an incredibly approachable (for children) account of how challenging parenting can be. I think it can allow children, with the use of metaphors that are comprehensible to them, to see themselves when they are wild, but not feel the guilt of it, and then, as a result, begin to feel an understanding for their parents and guardians as well as what it really means to cooperate and behave. If you read the book, what I have written, will make a lot more sense. But because of this, I can see why Maurice Sendak wanted the book when his masterpiece already existed, it's because he could only tell so much about subjects that he could only vaguely allude.

Dave Eggers is a talented wordsmith but there is no force of story here, just a collection of random scenes bouncing from one moment to the next at the whim of an 8 year-old central character. I haven't read the original book (gasp! unless it was long ago when I too was 8-ish) but it seems as if Eggers is pushing through some mandatory checklist of sorts. Wolf costume? Check. Boat? Check. Kingship? Check. The prose just seems to wander about the island with monsters in tow and no real purpose or challenge other than the occasional foul mood, jealous hurt feelings, or childish misstep. The broken nonsensical logic of a self-centered and destructive young boy is at times hilarious but when all of the characters in this world bump along at the same insane illogical gait the reader grows weary and begins to wonder if this all isn't just a huge waste of time.

I really enjoyed reading this book and seeing a part of Max's life. The book brings forth the reasons why Max acts out and the hardships he faces with only being a kid, and feeling like so much more is expected of him.