Jazper
Look-Alikes
The Good Little Girl

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T A B L E++T A L K

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BROWSE THE WILD THINGS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
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Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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Things are not quite what they seem
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THEMES OF TRANSFORMATION POPULATE THREE WEIRDLY HYPNOTIC BOOKS IN WHICH A LITTLE GIRL GROWS INTO A GREEN MONSTER AND A BABY BUG BECOMES A CHEESE DOODLE.

BY POLLY SHULMAN | When I was your daughter's age, or a bit older, I would often come home from school to find that my mother had been at my doll house again. She would leave a raw brussels sprout on the kitchen table, a perfect doll's cabbage; she made me an elevator out of a cricket cage, an empty spool and a length of bakery string. She said I had inspired her with my own improvisations: a walnut-shell cradle, perfume-sampler lamps with toothpaste-cap shades, footstools and cafe chairs made from the wire fasteners that keep champagne corks secure until New Year's Eve. Was it a passion for metaphor and puns? Were we identifying too strongly with Cinderella's godmother? Were we seeking dominion over the tiny and commonplace? Whatever the reason, there was nothing quite so satisfying to us as creating something out of -- not nothing, but something else.

To honor the pleasure we both took in transformations, I'm planning to give Mom Joan Steiner's "Look-Alikes." This volume of photographic still lifes is marketed as a puzzle book for children, but it's really something more profound: a meditation on nostalgia and utopia, or a series of visual lyrics, or maybe a vivid dream.

In each spread, Steiner builds a scene from objects ranging in size from a bean to a guitar, challenging readers to identify them. In the first scene, a train races across an embankment of potatoes and jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Its wheels are handcuffs and soda cans, its bumper a harmonica. The machinery driving the wheels is assembled from wrenches and compasses, a can opener, a battery, a roll of film, a toy gun, a book of matches, a sewing-machine bobbin and dozens of other bits of clutter enchanted into a sleek vehicle that puffs cotton steam. Turn the page and the train arrives in an art-deco station skylit through tennis rackets, with paintbrush pillars, a kazoo to announce departures and a waiting room elegantly domed with a vegetable steamer. On other pages the train travels through the city, stopping at a general store, a fair, a circus, a harbor. There are my champagne caps in the park scene, posing as trash baskets; there are my perfume-bottle lamps in the hotel lobby, this time with coffee-creamer shades.

Steiner sets her scenes in a lost era not too long past -- before New York's Penn Station was demolished, perhaps, when drugstores had soda fountains (made of coin counters and thimbles), when the five-and-dime had a tin ceiling (made of playing cards) and a potbellied stove (a hand grenade). But as if to remind us that we're standing in the present looking back, Steiner tucks in the occasional CD and pocket calculator -- ingredients that could hardly have been imagined when a garter fastener was used to hold up stockings (here it's part of a butcher's scale).

The scenes are not entirely benign, either. A close look reveals bullets and knives, fish hooks, that grenade and those handcuffs. Steiner doesn't hesitate to juxtapose edibles with objects that could crack a tooth. She assembles counter stools from brass hose nozzles, silver dollars and dried apricot cushions, and gives a thermos train a pair of Malomar smokestacks. The effect is a little like finding a razor blade in your apple. And she populates the scenes with realistic people and animals done in modeling clay, as happy and sinister as dolls. Her favorite objects -- pencils, pennies, an egg slicer, a nail brush, those champagne doodads -- appear over and over, like symbols. As with dreams, the meaning of her pictures seems at once self-evident and elusive.

Like "Look-Alikes," "The Good Little Girl," by writer Lawrence David and illustrator Clément Oubrerie, understands that transformations make up a huge part of children's fantasy life. But this picture book handles the theme with much less subtlety. Obedient Miranda, the 6-ish heroine, lets her workaholic parents off the hook once too often. But when her mother, too tired to cook the traditional Saturday Family Waffle Breakfast, sets a plate of bacon and eggs in front of Miranda, the little girl grows into a mean, green monster named Lucretia. Shrunken to the size of a pin, Miranda sits inside Lucretia's head looking out and timorously enjoying the ride while her monster alter ego takes a turn running the show: "Dad, if you want your good little girl back, you have to put on a dress and dance the Watusi. Mom, you have to clean the chimney with your tongue. Dad, you have to eat a bowl of spaghetti with peanut butter and meatball sauce. Mom, you have to stick pencils up your nose and sing 'Polly Wolly Doodle ...'"

All this is very gratifying while it lasts, but it can't go on forever. David and Oubrerie must eventually get Miranda back again, which they do by making her mad at Lucretia. "I hate you," she screams. "You're only mean, never nice!" And back she grows, retaining only a tiny, interior Lucretia to assert herself occasionally when things get really bad. This psychologically pat conclusion puts too much responsibility on Miranda, it seems to me, letting the parents off the hook again.

Like "The Good Little Girl," Richard Egielski's "Jazper," a folk tale-inspired picture book, uses transformation to lend a young hero the power that usually belongs to adults. Jazper, the son of a working-class bug, sets out to look for a job when an accident at the tomato plant puts his dad out of work. What he finds is an education. Housesitting for five weird moths, he studies their books of magic. On their return, the moths catch him entertaining the town by transforming himself into cheese doodles, soap bubbles and pickles. Furious, they turn into knives and attack. Jaz counters by becoming a nut: They respond by becoming nutcrackers. The shape-shifting duel continues to its satisfying if inevitable conclusion. Proudly, Jaz cares for his father when he needs to, then happily becomes a child again when he can.

Jazper and his father live in an eggshell with a striped paper straw for a chimney; a nearby milk carton serves as a townhouse. In his delightful pictures -- which are goofy and affectionate, but never sappy -- Egielski makes witty use of scale, rather as Steiner does. After all, as the three authors understand, the biggest transformation of childhood may be a matter of scale, but to negotiate it successfully requires all the imagination a child can muster.
SALON | Nov. 16, 1998

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B O O K _ I N F O R M A T I O N:

LOOK-ALIKES | BY JOAN STEINER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LINDLEY | LITTLE, BROWN

THE GOOD LITTLE GIRL | BY LAWRENCE DAVID, ILLUSTRATED BY CLéMENT OUBRERIE | DOUBLEDAY

JAZPER | BY RICHARD EGIELSKI | HARPERCOLLINS/A LAURA GERINGER BOOK