Where All the Missing Items Are Mended: On THE PREPOSTEROUS WEEK
by Robb Todd
The townspeople found secret passages in the orchard, the riverbed and between the mountains. They crawled through the dark tunnels, all of which led them to a giant attic.
When Stan Mack read this scene in the manuscript for a children's book called The Preposterous Week, he said it sparked the first idea for one of his illustrations.
"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space," said Mack, who might be best known for his two-decade run in the Village Voice with the comic strip “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies." "I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."
“I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points.”
That is also what The Preposterous Week said to me when I was a child, though I had never been able to articulate that as well as Mack did in his response to questions I sent about the process of illustrating the book my father, George Keenen, wrote.
The book opened my young mind and, later, influenced the way I thought about what could be done on the page as a writer. It also was the most tangible connection I had with my father until I was a teenager. I read it often and still do.
“Children want to be challenged, made to think and reconsider; they want to learn and grow and become wiser,” Adam Gidwitz, a children's book author, wrote in the New Yorker. “Kids will like a book with a great story. But they will only love a book that makes them see the world in a new way.”
My father's words and Mack's illumination of them did that for me. But this standard did not change as I grew older and moved on to books without pictures. Why should it? Every reader of every age would be lucky to find this in everything they read.
Neither Mack nor my father would call The Preposterous Week literature, but they agree that the form can achieve that distinction. Others have said it does not matter if children's books can be considered literature because the distinction is only important to adults.
Others still have said absolutely not, as did the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. In 2013, the school's creative writing program posted this on its website: "You won't write mass-market thrillers or children's fiction on our programmes. You'll be encouraged to look deep inside yourself for your own truth and your own experiences, and also outside yourself at the contemporary world around you."
The outrage was immediate and the apology from the school was swift. Philip Pullman flamed the controversy on social media by posting a screenshot of the program's description on Twitter.
"Children's fiction is entirely capable of being great literature," he later wrote in the Guardian. "Indeed, if you're looking for writing that changes the reader and the world, there may be no better form.... It's impossible to overstate the transformative effects they can have upon individual readers — and collectively, across generations, upon the world."
The Preposterous Week shared shelf space in my childhood bedroom with other illustrated books that certainly qualify as literature: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, and The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.
“My father's book was published nearly a half-century ago and is out of print, but there are several copies on my shelf at all times.”
My father's book was published nearly a half-century ago and is out of print, but there are several copies on my shelf at all times. They are mostly used editions, discarded by libraries that I buy on the internet to hand out as gifts whenever a friend has a baby.
Now the book shares shelf space with others that qualify but do not have pictures, such as Black Light by Kimberly King Parson, Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson and Tracing the Horse by Diana Marie Delgado.
This is the story of The Preposterous Week: On Monday, the townspeople wake up and discover that their river is missing; on Tuesday, the valley that led to another town disappears; on Wednesday, the shade from an apple tree is stolen; on Thursday, the townspeople form a committee to investigate; on Friday, everyone searches for the river, valley, and the shadow but find nothing; on Saturday, they discover the secret passageways to the attic where all the missing items are being mended by a tiny, loud, grumpy old man. The river needs stitching! The shadow needs ironing! The valley must be polished! He scolds the townspeople, kicks them out, finishes the repairs, and delivers everything on Sunday.
My father said the idea came to him one morning before breakfast. He wrote it in about 15 minutes, then left for the train from Jersey City, NJ, to the advertising agency that employed him in Manhattan. He gave the manuscript to Rick Meyerowitz, an illustrator best known for his work with National Lampoon, including the movie poster for Animal House. But Meyerowitz passed the manuscript to Mack.
"I loved it, and had a great time illustrating — suited my sense of the wacky," Mack said.
There is no enduring illustrated book for children that does not also have brilliant art, but that duality might also be why this form struggles for respect, often facing a dismissiveness that songwriters, for example, never contend with despite their words being enhanced by others.
Former Children's Laureate (did you know there is such a thing?) Julia Donaldson defended the seriousness of kids books in the Telegraph, and recounted a stinging question at a book festival. The interviewer wanted to know why so many books for young children have pictures in them. She said that struck her "rather like asking a playwright, 'Why do so many plays have characters in them?'"
Mack and my father did not collaborate directly on the book, which Mack said took a month or two to illustrate. They met for the first time only after it was done, but it was a duet nonetheless.
"I’ve done a couple cartoon histories, which I compared to Broadway musicals," Mack said. "My narrative is the same as the actor's spoken dialogue and my cartoons are the same as their songs — big bursts of colorful elaborations."
During a recent move, Mack told me he came across some of the original illustrations for The Preposterous Week; the discovery made him realize how much he enjoyed drawing the story.
"Looking at them today, I think those are not cartoon people, they're real," he said. "The variety of characters, the manic action, the acceptance of the absurd, the repairman bringing an insane logic to the whole deal, in a crazy way. Those are New Yorkers. I was drawing New York."
I asked him what he thinks The Preposterous Week is about, its deeper meaning. He said that for him it was about "drawing a link between the life in a fantasy small town (my home town of Providence) and the big, bad, bold supposed reality of New York City.
"But, I think the bigger theme is the you of today digging into the text, looking for links between the young you fascinated by the story and of the father you mainly knew through the story.
"Heavy, but maybe something there?"
Something there, indeed — and yet another story that Mack has illuminated.
Robb Todd is a journalist and author in New York City. He has lived all over the country and was lucky enough to live in Hawaii twice. He also lived in Texas twice. And North Carolina twice. Actually, this is his second stop in New York City, too. He doesn’t do things right the first time.
