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New in the World of Picture Books

 James Marshall is among my favorite writers; when I imagine a "best case" voice for a storyteller, it's pretty close to the voice of James Marshall. Marshall is droll, gay, inventive, slightly bitchy; his main concern is what people say, and do not say, to each other. His stories are so much smarter than your standard picture book, it's as if he worked in his own bizarre field, population of one. There are James Marshall books; then, there is everything else.


When "The Complete George and Martha" was published, an essayist noted that Marshall's own life resembled his stories. The essayist pointed to the pea-soup tale, in which George stains his shoes in an effort to hide his friend from a painful truth. The essayist recalled that he and James Marshall had a date, and Marshall bowed out because of "an injured leg." When the essayist spotted Marshall on the sidewalk--with a fully functional leg--he suddenly felt as if he had become Martha the hippo, steering awkwardly through an absurd situation.

It was inevitable that someone would write a book *about* Marshall--and now it's here. A main obsession of "Jim!" is the way in which Marshall repackaged his own life as art. A nasty teacher once told him he would never become an artist; that teacher later became Viola Swamp. A friend observed that Maurice Sendak and James Marshall were "a couple of cut-ups"--and so the series "The Cut-Ups" was born. Marshall dedicated his final book, "The Owl and the Pussycat," to his partner Billy, because the romance between the two animals is really the romance that became the centerpiece of James Marshall's adult life.

I'm not sure how anyone could resist this book. Recommended.

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