easy reader

There's this place called Centerburg which has always appeared just off the map
from our collective unconsciousness.  It's a past where the town fathers and other
leading citizens gather at the barber shop while they let their children mind
the diner and bring petty criminals to justice at the end of a gun.  It's where
ten year old boys could take the family cart and mare into town on their own, or
tame a skunk for a pet with just a little milk, an innocent place where the idea
of factory produced homes is welcomed progress and a contest to see which old
codger owns the largest ball of string is prime entertainment for a week.  And
at the center of it all, whether witness or participant, is Homer Price.

As one of Robert McCloskey's rare forages outside the realm of the picture book
(Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal), Homer Price takes the form of
fanciful memoir, the kind of stories written of a young man's fancied retelling
of his Ohio home town.  Naturally Centerburg doesn't exist, but plenty of
Midwest towns like it did exist in the early part of the 20th century and it
breathes a homespun charm not unlike a Frank Capra film or a Thornton Wilder play.

Reading this in the late 1960's there was still a sense that these small towns
still existed, not yet gobbled up by the big cities.  I had no doubts that just
outside of Los Angeles there were dozens of these Centerburg's dotting the
landscape at the edges of the desert and the foothills of the Sierra's.  More
exciting was the prospect that out there, somewhere, a man was in need of a ten
year old boy to mind the diner while the donut machine ran amok pumping out
thousands of the golden cake rings begging to be eaten.  That a
boy could tame a wild animal made perfect sense to me as I explained to my
parents how (but not why) I could keep a pet squirrel in the closet under the
stairs.  Never mind that: we lived in a city and rarely saw squirrels; that the
closet had no light in it; that the only nuts I was able to gather for it were
from eucalyptus trees.  All that mattered to me was that if Homer Price could do
it, so could I.

The collection of stories in Homer Price are homespun and sly at times, with
only one real dud in the bunch.  McCloskey's attempt to modernize The Pied Piper
of Hamlin almost threatens to destroy everything leading up to it, but the final
story regains sure footing and brings together every major character from
previous stories to a grand finale.

Rereading it I can't help but wonder about the black people of Centerburg, only
hinted at in these stores.  They appear twice, when a poor boy finds a diamond bracelet
in a donut (and is rewarded with $100) and in the town celebration
when theBaptist choir sings out a sort of folk-blues commentary on the
town's history. It is both an accurate and sad reflection of the times
that towns like Centerburg existed, and that the poor and minority
communities lived on the outskirts and peripheries. I wouldn't doom
this book to the type of drubbing that Twain's boyhood tales receive
but it would be nice to get an inner city version of Homer Price to
balance things out, perhaps a Harlem-based version of the 30's and 40's
that celebrated the same spirit of boyhood adventure minus any sort of
social message or literary revisionism.

// posted by dlz @ 11:01 AM