Pavlov's Bell Monday, February 09, 2004

Breezed through a couple of books I loved as a kid: "A Dog on Barkham Street" and "The Bully of Barkham Street." As square and lovable as your mom and dad. The first book concerns a basically nice kid who gets tormented by the fatso next door; the second book tells the same story from the bully's point of view. As a kid I was intrigued that you could switch perspective like that, and that the basically nice kid turned out to be, on closer observation, something of a shit, while the bully wasn't so bad at all.

As I said, it's a pretty square book, with lots of stern, sensible fathers and fluttering mothers. But there's a certain complexity to them you don't often find in kids' books, especially in the bully's tale. We aren't made to sympathize with him for some outre reason (his parents beat him up etc.), but because he's struggling to be good and falling short. He knows it, everyone around him knows it, but they don't know how to solve it. Interesting.

Why all these kids' books? It's either this or the Norman Podhoretz Reader.

@ 9:22:00 PM,

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