Featuring Local Authors & Regional Interests
Hudson Valley Bookshelf
The Bedtime Trichotomy
by Celia Bland
Review of Uncle Andy's by James Warhola (Penguin Putnam, $16.99), Curse in Reverse, by Tom Coppinger and Dirk Zimmer (Simon & Schuster, $16.95), and A Day in the Life of Murphy, by Alice Provenson (Simon & Schuster, $16.95).
It sounds like a philosophical maxim: I have young children, ergo I read a lot of children's books. Whether I want to or not. The night time routine is divided into three categories of being: the nights we read the books that the children don't seem to enjoy as much as I do—such as Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Ginger and Pickles; the nights I suffer through the books, which shall remain nameless, that the children love to hear over and over and that I heartily detest; and the nights we read the books we all love: books by Robert McCloskey, books about Eloise and Madeleine and Martha Blah-Blah, the talking dog. Into this last category—books that sing the children, but not me, to sleep—falls a new favorite: Uncle Andy's: a Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol, written and illustrated by James Warhola.
Warhola, a Tivolian (and a friend), has illustrated lots of children's books—Bigfoot Cinderella, If You Hopped Like a Frog, Bubba the Cowboy Prince (all of which I've read many times)—but this is the first book he's written and illustrated. The story has all the charms of One Morning in Maine—it opens up a world to us, the world of kids who are not ordinary but neither are they idealized. Young Jamie, the hero, is one in the large brood of a junk man who likes to make sculptures out of engine blocks, stray faucets, and oversized bolts. He also sorts the junk into different metals and sells it. One morning the family sets off in their rusty station wagon to pay a surprise visit to their Uncle Andy, a famous artist.
Uncle Andy is, of course, Andy Warhol, and Warhola draws direct parallels between his father's aesthetic (and commercial) interest in junk and his uncle's aesthetic (and commercial) interest in soup cans, Brillo boxes, and Pepsi signs. As Jamie, well on his way to becoming an artist himself, learns in the course of the story: "Art is something that is all around us all of the time."
A good moral, a fine thought, but it's the colorful and expressive illustrations that drive the point home. Every page makes you laugh—the loving details, the glorious colors, the comic characters. The book invites a multiplicity of readings; it amuses the child while proffering an almost secret language to the adults. Yes, the two-page spread of the family's entrance into New York City is gorgeously rendered—but look again!—references to Warhol's career are imbedded in the cityscape. The text is lettered on a billboard above an I. Miller storefront—the business that hired young Warhol to draw shoes for its advertisements (the cover's font mimics these drawings' Beardsley-esque curves). There's a Coke bottle, a Campbell soup billboard, an ad for Camel—in short, the illustration seems a blueprint of Warhol's early career. My kids' favorite drawing was the cross section of Uncle Andy's house from basement to attic, with the kids running "like a band of wild monkeys" up and down the stairs, and a subway coming into a station just a few feet from the basement foundation.
Some of my interest in the book, I admit, comes from a voyeuristic interest in Andy Warhol, the private man. I always imagined Warhol as an enigmatic publicity hound. I knew he lived with his mom, and I remember reading once that he never invited people to his house, only to The Factory, his downtown headquarters for "happenings" and films. Reading Uncle Andy's, we get to surprise the working artist, as the Warholas do, by showing up on his doorstep. What can he say but "Ohhhh!" and invite us in?
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Curse in Reverse by Irish writer Tom Coppinger, with illustrations by Kingston's own Dirk Zimmer, is another new favorite. It's a fairy tale that manages to be both old and new at once. Zimmer's beautifully-inked pictures suggest a similar dichotomy; they have the flatness of woodcuts and something of the grotesqueries of the Brothers Grimm, while conveying a vivid modernity in the details of inns, mansion, and cottages. Again, the illustrations do much to convey the emotional qualities of this morality tale of a witch whose curses come home to roost in amusing ways. The story has a punning lightheartedness the kids adored, even as they were struck by its parable of hospitality and generosity. This, too, is the story of people who aren't well-off but who manage to count their blessings and see the beauty in their lives. The bad are punished (in wonderfully apt ways), and the good are rewarded, and the parents can savor the clever linguistics of these just desserts.
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Alice Provenson, illustrator of many classics, including one of the more unusual children's books I've read, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, has written and illustrated a dog's eye view of life: A Day in the Life of Murphy. Murphy is a black terrier that loves to sniff, to eat, to bark, to beg scraps, to chase cats. What he doesn't like is to visit the vet, but that's what happens on this particular day. The illustrations are colorful, engaging, and a delight for the young dog lover. Murphy's voice vacillates between doggy thinking—a shorthand of wants and needs—and a more anthropomorphic voice that conveys the plot. One might wish for a more onomatopoetic or distinctive narration or for a more adventurous canine, such as the ones in Margery Flack's classic Angus series; but the little girls and I both loved the part where Murphy tells the other animals in the barn that he was barking, barking, barking because he could hear the moon move! I've promised the girls that tonight we will to listen very hard and bark if we can hear it too.
Read also A Conversation with James Warhola, Dirk Zimmer and Alice Provenson
