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Pinkwater's writing reminds you how easy it is to sneak out of the ordinary world. All you need to do is take the bus to a different neighborhood, catch a midnight movie, walk to the end of an unfamiliar street and you're somewhere else: Tintown, Mars, the Waka-Waka plane of existence. What you find there is unexpectedly beautiful.

In "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death," there's a description of Beanbender's, a beer hall tucked away in the slums of Baconburg:

Beanbender's was made up of a number of dead trucks and a couple of railroad cars arranged in a circle, like covered wagons in the movies, made into a circle for protection against the Indians. All the dead trucks and railroad cars were covered with wooden shingles and banked with earth and gravel above the wheels. A number of kerosene lanterns were fastened to the outside of the circle. There was a door, with a lantern on either side, lighting up a sign painted on a board. BEANBENDER'S, it said.

This is Fellini in Wonderland, a magical world made of junk, a permanent carnival hiding in the underbelly of your hometown.

His writing is, in fact, so good that you sometimes wonder why children are the only ones who are supposed to like it. Pinkwater makes no bones about the fact that he writes for children -- he likes it that way. Grown-ups, he says, read mostly in order to go to sleep (which, he notes in passing, may explain much of contemporary American fiction). Children, on the other hand, haven't acquired the "habit of reading"; they pick up a book because they're interested in what you're saying, and if they aren't interested, they put the book down.

Pinkwater likens writing to stage magic: Kids don't go for sleight-of-hand because they aren't distracted by the magician's patter. To enchant them you need boxes with hollow walls, hidden pockets, mechanisms they don't understand. Children are demanding, irreverent and hard to fool.

This is an optimistic view of childhood, and it's one worth taking seriously. Pinkwater is talking back to Ritalin. If children have short attention spans, he implies, it's because nothing offered to them is interesting enough to hold their attention for long. Pinkwater's books are ample proof that, given the right materials, kids are capable of the kind of attentiveness we associate with, say, Proust scholars or 11th-century monks.

Witness the fan who tracked down 30 Pinkwater novels, or the author of the Hoboken Emergencyclopedia, a glossary of everything in the Pinkwater universe, from the Abominable Snowman ("a large hippie with big feet") to Zuzuki ("pushing one's opponent on the chest with one's head"). The entry for "pickle" traces the significance of said condiment in kosher, dill and sliced forms through seven novels, all cross-referenced. If anything, Pinkwater's fans may be a little too dedicated; the school psychologist would probably diagnose them with attention surplus disorder.

The readers who build Web-based glossaries are exceptional, but they're by no means the only fans. When Pinkwater started out as a children's author, he assumed that his audience would be mostly kids like himself: bookish, slightly maladjusted, with a 10-dollar vocabulary and a taste for the bizarre. The sort of children, in other words, who grow up to be writers, or monks, or (God forbid!) Proust scholars.

Not so.

To his amazement, Pinkwater gets fan letters from the normal children, too: the cheerleaders, the class presidents, the captains of the soccer team. "Maybe I'm a better writer than I thought," he speculates. Could it be, I ask, that people are also stranger than he anticipated? He agrees: "Everyone is freakier than I thought."

Indeed. Why else would a reader in her 20s write to Pinkwater about the meaning of cheese? The truth is that his appeal cuts across a number of boundaries: normal vs. weird, old vs. young. Pinkwater's writing is absurd, but so is the world -- witness Emergency Librarian Magazine, Jesse Ventura or just about anything on the Web. Where there's room to accept absurdity, there's room for wonder. Reading Pinkwater, you can sit back and think about how strange everything is and, occasionally, how beautiful.

There are, of course, those who would argue that it's unhealthy to read a children's author past the age of, say, 24. Big people are supposed to reserve their enthusiasm for real estate, business plans and zero-sum games played by linguistically-impoverished men with hairy knuckles. This, in my view, is real nonsense. A world in which it's uncool for grownups to care passionately about books -- children's books, any books -- would be infinitely scarier than a world with telepathic avocados or real estate agents from outer space.

Therefore, read Pinkwater. Read him to your children. Read him in secret when your children aren't around. With a veritable cavalcade of Pinkwater books due in the spring, you have no excuse to do otherwise, unless you're an avocado or, I suppose, a real estate agent.
salon.com | Feb. 4, 2000

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