The Penderwicks at Last

Why have I not written? Let me count the ways. No, let me sum up. I have not written because I have not written. Life continues happily apace here in Darwinland. Each day brings some fresh incident, but as they're mostly funny little quotidian things, they're not of much interest to anyone but us. Last Thursday, a week ago now, Child #5 finally had her tonsils out (and her adenoids, and she also had a nasal turbinate reduction, which is to say the surgeon essentially roto-rootered her upper nasal passage), bringing, we hope, an end to the storyline that was strep throat. She is recovering well, you'll be happy to know, even though 13 is geriatric in terms of tonsil surgery.

Life is like that, you know? You blink, and all the little day to day dramas and laughs have built up to time passing. Distilling that time into a narrative, and not just a collection of anecdotes and characters, can be tricky, especially if there's not some overarching drama to resolve. 

Which brings me to The Penderwicks at Last, which I read, and then skimmed, in one bout of increasingly disappointed consumption, rather as one eats the whole box of cereal looking for a plastic prize.

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The first Penderwicks book was a delight, mostly -- a story of four sisters and their absent-minded professor of a father (given to Latin quotes, you know, as erudite professor fathers are), vacationing in the caretaker cottage of a grand estate called Arundel. They become friends with the boy who lives at the estate, despite his overbearing mother. Everything is a bit too charming, but the characters and situations are fun, in general, and the adventures innocent -- a bunch of modern children strangely unaffected by the world of screens.

If a book is a success, it is certain to have a sequel. The Penderwicks spawned three sequels of decreasing quality, until the fourth book, The Penderwicks in Spring, badly bungled the sisters responding to traumatic memories of their mother's death. Appalling behavior that called out for clinical intervention was brushed under the table. The author had lost control of her characters, and what were character quirks in the first book became serious social maladaptations, in a way that she was not able or willing to address realistically.

Whence this family dysfunction? All erased with a happy stroke of the author's pen in The Penderwicks at Last, an episodic collection of precious characters and no stakes. Ostensibly the story is about the wedding of the oldest Penderwick sister, to be held back where it all started, at Arundel, and the POV character is the youngest stepsister, 11-year-old Lydia, whose tweenhood seems untainted with any impending hint of adult complexity. But the family's minor wedding drama has absolutely no weight for the reader, nor has any other incident  -- there's no conflict whose happy resolution is not signaled pages or chapters in advance. Scads of oh-so-delightful characters (and dogs, three or four or six of them) surface just long enough to be interchangeably wise and charming. The original four sisters are now remote, blank slates on which the author has inscribed one or two residual character traits to manipulate as she pleases. The book dutifully namechecks lots of literature and music, and we're all aware that the author has read Little Women, making certain plot developments as predictable as tomorrow's date. 

It is right and just for a children's book to be mainly about the microcosmic dramas that seem so desperately important in the moment. The juvie novel devoted to grappling with Big History or current social mores already seems as dated as the Improving Literature foisted upon the defiant Jane Eyre. Make kids' lit small again! But even small things need real weight to register. By the middle of the book, Lydia is already achingly nostalgic for the twee memories she's still in the middle of making, and the reader is nostalgic for the kind of children's book where the events matter as much to her as to the characters. There's no prize at the bottom of this cereal box, just a powdery pile of sugar dust.