The Important Books: Children's Picture Books as Art and Literature (review)

This slender volume consists of half a dozen essays—most published in some version elsewhere—on children's picture book writers and illustrators. The essays focus on specific books and specific artists—the works of Margaret Wise Brown, Arnold Lobel, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, William Joyce, and one chapter is devoted to Donald Hall and Barbara Cooney's Ox-Cart Man. As his title suggests, these are among the most important names in modern children's picture book illustration.

In his brief introduction, Stanton writes that a picture book must appeal to both children and the parents who buy the books "in equal measure." He refers to the "marketplace circumstances that spur the ongoing development of the form" of the picture book and goes further to say that "[p]icture book writers and artists cannot afford to bore or mystify either parent or child" and that the very best picture books reach both audiences (2). However, on the following page he refers to the tepid adult reaction to Where the Wild Things Are in the face of the unbridled enthusiasm of the children. Here he argues that "children are capable of appreciating the greatness of a compelling original work more than many adults" (3). This seeming contradiction suggests, if nothing else, the complex nature of the picture book, and this is one of the themes of this collection.

The individual essays themselves are lucid and at times insightful. Stanton is a critic who can speak with clarity and without becoming bogged down in specious critical jargon and ponderous literary theory. On the other hand, some may find that the brevity of the essays and of the book as a whole (it is under one hundred pages) prevents Stanton from thoroughly exploring any of his subjects. We learn a little about a half dozen writers and illustrators—and not really a lot about any of them.

In his chapter on Margaret Wise Brown, Stanton focuses on her characters who are either runaway children or children alone in the world, from which he deduces that her interest is in the "rebellious aggressiveness" of the child. Stanton praises Brown for her lack of sentimentalism tempered by her belief in the interconnectedness between the parent and child. He relates an amusing anecdote about Brown who, when someone pointed out the seeming contradiction between her writing children's stories and hunting rabbits with hounds, remarked, "Well, I don't especially like children either. At least not as a group. I won't let anybody get away with anything just because he is little" (8). Stanton is at his most imaginative when discussing Goodnight Moon, in which is sees a mythical construction of the naming of the universe, not at its beginning, but at its ending. Although he does not make this connection, it is tempting to recall the conclusion of Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. However, if the story is about the ending of the universe, what does that mean in the context of the child's bedtime tale? Stanton never explains.

In the chapter on Arnold Lobel, Stanton compares the characters of Frog and Toad with the comedy team of Abbot and Costello, and refers to them as vaudevillian. But beyond the observation that in us all is a little of the fool and a little of the sage, Stanton has few insights, and he has surprisingly little to say about the illustrations—even though this entire study is presented as an examination of the picture book.

A very brief chapter treats Donald Hall's The Ox-Cart Man, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, which he interestingly compares to a medieval book of hours in its expression of ordinary everyday life as it moves through the months of the year. He contends, quite convincingly, that this book is an ideal collaboration between poet and artist, the work of each enhancing the other. It is the quintessential picture book in that the union of the pictures and text...