Russell Hoban/Forty Years: Essays on His Writings for Children (review)

Collections of essays pose a particular problem for the reviewer: how to do justice to so many writers, so many interpretive postures? It might seem that when the essays are collected around a single writer the problem is less, yet when that writer is the allusive and illusive Russell Hoban, the problem (if such it is) only increases. Alida Allison's collection, Russell Hoban/Forty Years covers the output of a writer as much at home with picture books as with novels for children, verse, and adult fiction and short stories. But in this collection, as always, selections have been made, which makes the reviewer's job easier. The selection is unsurprising, and this is no fault. In the main, picture books and novels draw the critics on; among Hoban's novels, The Mouse andHis Child is more discussed than any other, while those who write about his picture books browse more freely among the riches on offer.

Writing about picture books is a difficult undertaking. Jamie Madden takes on the task in her discussion of monsters and machines, recurring themes for Hoban. What she doesn't treat in detail is the cooperative work that lies within Hoban's picture books; most of them are illustrated by others. Perhaps because of this most of Madden's discussion turns on the texts of the books, so the relation of text to illustration, arguably the most important aspect of the picture book, remains unanalyzed. Something similar occurs in James Carter's "Mice-en-Scene," which, taking The Mouse and His Child as its focus, is a comparative study of the novel and the feature film based upon it. Once again the focus of the analysis is the novel and its plot and narrative, rather than the surely more remarkable fact that a creation made of words has been translated into images and, moreover, animated. A discussion of studio style might have helped here, as might some account of the role of the animated film in bringing previously literary texts to the screen: was Hoban's work treated differently from that of the unnamed authors of fairy tales, for example?

That The Mouse and His Child should provide the starting-point for much of the work presented in this collection is small surprise. The book is extraordinary, and extraordinarily puzzling. Not to James Addison, though. Addison reads the novel systematically, and the system he has in mind is provided by William Blake. According to Addison's reading, Hoban, like William Blake, "wants to posit the redeemed thing within the fallen, nightmarish thingness that the world has erected" (85). The analogy has its interest, reminding us of the intertextuality of all writing. However, the attempt to produce closure or, to put it in Addison's terms, "a systematic, thoroughgoing critical reading of the text as a whole" (83) tends to demote a writerly text, in Roland Barthes' terms, to a readerly one; surely this is a misprision? By contrast, Christine Wilkie-Stibbs interprets the novel in terms of postmodernism, a term almost as puzzling in its myriad meanings as Hoban's novel itself.

John Stephens offers a reading that suggests an openended dialogue with the novel through which we can, today, read the novel in terms of our present understandings of some of its central themes. Territory, for example, among Hoban's most potent metaphors, gets a very interesting reading from Stephens. He brings his reading up to date by thinking about global change, and how that affects the key questions, "What are we?" and "Where are we?" the profoundly moving and philosophical questions that the mouse child puts to his father. How, Stephens asks, do we read these questions today, thirty years after the novel's publication? His response is to take his reader through the history of the diasporas of the past thirty years, and to...