Liars and Saints

 Here are three things I absorbed, or tried to absorb, about parenting this year: (1) Perspective-taking. If your child suddenly decides he dislikes mac and cheese, it's maybe not great to say  NO! You LOVE mac and cheese!  Surely you've had a mood so black that even a previously delightful thing--like a Barbara Pym novel--becomes, suddenly, odious? One thing to consider saying is:  Ah, you dislike mac and cheese? That's interesting. Tell me more about that.... (2)  A tantrum is like a fire, but a big response can be like more gasoline.  You think your response is water to extinguish the fire, but really you're just adding to the fuel. (3)  Probably the best voice to use with a kid is a whisper.  I personally like when another human uses a soft voice. Imagine being tiny: Many, many adults must sound like braying Donald Trumps! This has been eye-opening for me. I borrowed these ideas from "Raising Raffi," by Keith Gessen, a book I loved.

"Caps for Sale" has been in print for around 75 years, and it's a subversive masterpiece. The adult, the central character, is a fool. He sells hats, but he stores them by stacking them in a long, skinny tower on top of his own head. When the peddler goes to sleep, in a forest, monkeys descend and steal all the hats. The peddler wakes up. He discovers the problem. He tries to use strong language with the monkeys. They simply repeat his words back to him. Finally, in frustration, the peddler tosses his one remaining hat to the  ground. Having been trained to "ape" the peddler, the monkeys now relinquish all their hats. I love the colorful illustrations, and I really love that no one learns anything in this book. The events are random and chaotic, just as in actual life. The writer, Slobodkina, emigrated from Russia, after the Revolution of 1917 made things unstable for her Jewish family. She is cited for having "pulled together imagery and objects into magni...

  Keith Gessen has a new parenting memoir--"Raising Raffi"--and of course I went right to the section on kids' books. Gessen writes beautifully about Russell Hoban, who is maybe the greatest of the greats. Gessen admires Hoban for maintaining creative juice all through the Frances series: The concluding book, "Bargain for Frances," seems just as strong as the first entry, "Bedtime for Frances." Gessen admires Frances's crafty and patient parents, who endure Frances's hunger strike and "runaway phase," and who never seem to break a sweat. Gessen also admires Hoban's "lapidary style, somewhere between poetry and prose": The little hand is at 7. It is seven o'clock. It is bedtime for Frances.... I really like Gessen's observations about Eric Carle. Carle spent part of his youth in America, but his German emigre parents were feeling homesick. The parents took Carle on a trip to Germany--then everyone was swept up in ...