The Wild Things by Dave Eggers
By Mark Flanagan, About.com
McSweeney's, October 2009
In 2004, film director Spike Jonze and author Dave Eggers began collaborating on the screenplay for a movie adaptation of the well-loved, Caldecott Medal-winning Maurice Sendak book, Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak's book is beautiful, both in its stream of consciousness prose and its vivid depictions of the wild things. It is however, a 16-sentence book, and the reader is left to fill in the details about Max and his family from their own life experience, which is part of what has made Where the Wild Things Are such an enduring children's book. Maurice Sendak's Max is a universal boy, from any place and all times.
In The Wild Things, Dave Eggers' novelization of Sendak's book, written in conjunction with the movie adaptation, Max is rooted in both time and place. He shares a house with his divorced mom and sister in the suburbs outside of the city where his dad has an apartment; he plays soccer in a league and Stratego with his friends; he is plagued with fears instilled by a science teacher who warns of climate change and super viruses; and he is shocked by the sudden demotion of Pluto from planet to "just some rock in space."
Max is beset on all sides by the idiocy of adults, a plight that Eggers illustrates early on when Max rides his bike down the street to visit a friend whose mother appears unable to process matters that to Max seem obvious:
"'How'd you get here?' she asked.
Another odd question. Max's bike was lying no more than four feet behind him, in plain sight. Could she not see it?
'Rode,' he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
'Alone?' she asked.
'Yup,' he said. This lady, Max thought.
'Alone?' she repeated. her eyes had gone wide. Poor Clay. His mom was nuts. Max knew he should be careful about what he might say to a crazy person. Didn't crazy people need to be treated with great care? He decided to be very polite."
This malady seems, to Max, endemic to adults, who he found to do and say all sorts of things that made no sense whatsoever. A series of altercations with his sister, his mom, and her simpering boyfriend Gary builds to the climactic break with his family in which Max dons his wolf suit and escapes to the land of the wild things.
Just as Eggers fills in the details of Max's home life, he fleshes out Sendak's monsters with personalities. They have names now - the large, striped one is Carol; the one with the bulbous nose is Ira; and the rooster-like monster is Douglas. There are seven in total, and when Max arrives upon the island after a long, eventless journey across the ocean, he finds this group of beasts irrationally making a party of destroying their own homes.
The wild things are like people, sometimes moody and irrational, sometimes vulnerable or vindictive, and during his time on the island Max finds himself in a tenuous role between them. He is at once their king and their pawn, striving to prove himself to them, while supporting their own emotional needs. They seem just as likely to turn on Max and eat him as they are to hold him up as their leader.
Eggers' Wild Things expands Sendak's story with additional depth and detail, and the depictions of the monsters and their antics are truly imaginative and have piqued my interest in the cinematic version. However, Max's adventures on the island of the wild things seem an oddly disjointed collection of scenes that don't actually move the narrative forward, and I closed this book with a shrug and the feeling that perhaps the novelized version of Where the Wild Things Are wasn't actually necessary.
http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/wild-things.htm?nl=1
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