the phantom tollbooth

my second grade teacher read her class this book. i adored it. a while back, i bought a copy, intending to reread it, but hadn’t gotten around to it… you know how these things are, right? but recently i had cause to sit down and reread it, which i’ll describe below.

i was putting together my website, and got it to a point where i was largely happy with it; however, i realized i needed a cover image for the reviews section. i hit upon the idea of making a collage with pages torn out of books. it’s an obvious way to go about it, but i had a problem. what book could i bear mulching for such a project? i was considering my (still unread) copy of atlas shrugged, but the print was too small, and i wasn’t sure how i felt about memorializing a book i despise like that.

once i remembered my copy of the phantom tollbooth, the solution was obvious. it is such a playful work. it treats words like toys, treats language like a game; it is so obviously didactic and immensely charming despite (or because of) that. it’s like if alice in wonderland was a 90s edutainment game. it’s a delight.

however, i can’t come at this with the simple adoration i felt for it as a child. its writing style is perhaps too heavy on adverbs and said-bookisms. the various encounters and setbacks are generally brief, and while that keeps them from overstaying their welcome, it also results in everything feeling kind of like a theme park ride. i can forgive these minor sins; it’s just so earnest that i find it hard not to. it’s a bedtime story picaresque.

of course, there’s the more pernicious undercurrent. naturally, the fantasy world is monarchical, and the hero’s quest is to rescue some princesses. looking past this feels like the price of admission for engaging with 99% of the fantasy genre. there’s more to pick at, though. the founding myth of the world it depicts involves a prince conquering a land filled with the demons of ignorance, settling a vile wilderness. this — of course — rings alarm bells. to some extent, this can be chalked up to standard usa background radiation. it’s an american children’s book from the 1960s. of course the Charming Fanciful Backstory is a settler-colonial retread. of course the humbug brags that he had ancestors traveling with columbus.

these flies in the ointment are small, in size if not in impact — the aforementioned Charming Fanciful Backstory is the most egregious one, and it only consists of a couple pages — but they’re there, and it feels wrong not to mention them. still, though, i enjoyed my time with the book.

as i read, i ripped particularly resonant pages out to collage with. this went against everything i’ve been taught for handling books, but… it feels right. it feels fitting to have one of my first literary loves enshrined in art. a tribute to treating words as toys and language as a game, and a tribute to having a critical eye for everything.

it’s tempting to say this book gave me a playful relationship with writing that i’ve carried forward until now.

those sorts of after-the-fact narratives are so often inaccurate… but it’s a nice story, isn’t it?