book 3: ellen raskin, the westing game
holy shit y’all. this book was intense. i stayed up way past my bedtime finishing it because i just could not go to bed without knowing how it ended — weekend reading, for sure!
i don’t want to say too much of it because while i don’t think the book’s quality depends on its surprise, the many, many surprises woven in are so delightful to experience. there are a suddenly appearing new apartment complex, mysterious letters of invitation delivered to hand-picked tenants, an abandoned (or is it) house, a discovered corpse, and a will. ah, yes, the will: sixteen heirs split into predetermined pairs, invited (to put it gently) to play the last game of possibly generous, possibly cruel industrialist sam westing, with the promised inheritance of $200 million dollars (and $10,000 just for showing up), and did i mention in the will he claims one of them took his life? there’s that too.
it’s a delightfully juicy set-up and the execution is just so impressive: i love any book that can pull off a good third-person omniscient, and this one balances a storyteller’s perspective (all the many tantalizing omissions are as carefully selected as what’s included) across 16 different characters with no effortful transitions from perspective to perspective, from action to inner thought — yet it totally works.
and it is work — you have to be alert to keep up with the book, although if you pay attention it isn’t hard or confusing — and i just love, love, love that even though (or possibly partly because) she’s writing for children, raskin (who won a newbery medal for this book) is so willing to trust her audience to be willing to do the work. i’m not saying children will understand everything that’s going on — i wouldn’t have, in elementary school. but i don’t know that it’s possible to write a really great children’s book that can be fully understood by children. children are used to not fully understanding the world around them; they kind of have to be willing to say “oh, okay, i sort of get it” and move on (see a recent conversation in which i tried to explain to The One Who Cries what the flu is and why it could kill the native americans but she would be fine). the world isn’t fully comprehensible to kids, so if you try to make your books fully comprehensible to kids, you will wind up writing down to them and limiting your scope.
…that kind of got away from raskin. but it applies to more than her sometimes ludicrously convoluted (IN THE BEST WAY) plot. one of my favorite characters was judge ford, the first female and the first black appellate judge in the state, who knows she deserves to be where she is and also knows other people won’t think that, no matter how spotless her career. definitely would not have appreciated that tension reading this as a (white) kid, or her recollections of not being able to play with the white children in the household where her parents were servants, or grace wexler’s racism (racism-with-a-smile! in a kids’ book!), or… etc. it’s a sharp book, like i said.
the novel isn’t flawless on all fronts. madame hoo, a character who recently moved from china and doesn’t speak english, is written in her few scenes with a certain wide-eyed mix of confusion and eagerness that i think was meant to portray how overwhelming it must be to live in a country where you don’t speak the language and most people, including your husband, are not particularly interested in communicating with you, but something about it came across a little uncomfortably childlike; and the novel dates itself to say the least with the description of one character’s relative (who does not appear in the book) as “mongoloid,” in medical terms. but i loved chris theodorakis’s ache for companionship, his desire to be spoken to frankly and like a person, not like a little kid.
i loved pretty much all of them, in the end (even grace grew on me, through some growing of her own), which is another wonderful achievement: how much life is given to these 16 people who share (in the copy i borrowed from the library, which also has small pages) a scant 184 pages that, again, cover a lot of twists and turns. they’re vividly drawn, quirky without being caricatures; they don’t feel at all borrowed from any other story or mind. and in their private dreams and frustrations they mostly all wind up sort of wonderful — at the end i was just rooting for them all, so hard. especially, it must me said, our shin-kicking (don’t touch her braid!) ungirly middle school heroine turtle (given name tabitha-rose) who… at one point after a haircut when someone compliments how cute she looks, the narration tells us “turtle didn’t want to look cute. she wanted to look mean.” turtle is the best and i want to adopt her, is what i’m saying.
this book is great! i fucking could not put it down!
