Joseph Thompson penned this review.
One of the best conversations I ever had as a child was with a large birch at the edge of a peat bog. I was 8 years old and stammered stupidly through most of the conversation. I don’t remember the tree saying much, but it made an excellent listener. Reading Gregory Maguire’s Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, I understand what that birch tree experienced twenty years ago.
As a coffee table book Making Mischief works because the art — both Sendak’s and his influences — are paired well. They create their own context. Words become unnecessary. The reader doesn’t need the author to explain William Blake’s influence on Sendak. The placement of Blake’s The Dance of Albion along side Sendak’s homoerotic Pierre — from the Herman Melville novel — proves that point without exposition. But Maguire wants to give the reader something more. Just as I did when I realized I could say everything I felt to the birch without interruption, Maguire chokes. He’s not just writing filler for a picture book. He’s trying to write honestly about a man and an artist he respects, admires, loves, even worships. The magnitude of the task overwhelms him.
For the first 151 pages, Maguire hides behind almost impenetrable academic speak and superficial conclusions. Of course I want to know more about the mythopoeic aspects of Sendak’s narratives. I am curious how the imaginative author of Wicked and Stepsister would relate those aspects to the Sendak motifs he examines. Instead, Maguire delivers a series of terse labels alongside the relevant pictures. He attempts a façade of bravado with occasional shout-outs to various literary and artistic giants. And he chuckles too quickly at his own jokes. The overall effect will make Sendak fans ignore the words and focus on the art. Maguire fans will wonder where his editor was. And newbies who pick up the book after seeing the movie Where the Wild Things Are will put it right back down.
Then there are pages 153 to 197.
In these last pages before the minimal acknowledgements and credits, Maguire remixes Where the Wild Things Are. He uses Sendak’s words, but he samples six decades of Sendak’s work to illustrate the story. The resulting retrospective reveals the greatness of Sendak. And through its creation, Maguire overcomes his self-consciousness, and for the first time, demonstrates his comprehension of Sendak’s greatness. And he comes to this conclusion: Sendak is so original that his greatest influence must be Sendak himself. It is a beautiful sentiment coming from a respected colleague and good friend. Its profundity is arguable, but through it, this coffee-table book becomes more than a series of pictures interrupted by pseudo-intellectual commentary. That observation is the appreciation.
Whatever inane things I told my birch tree, I’d like to believe I eventually reached a conclusion as eloquent as the paean Maguire created to finish this retrospective, something worth sitting through.
(William Morrow, 2009)
