You wonder what children see. The life of a child; what they see and what they hear, and what they don’t discuss with you. Or choose not to discuss.
—Maurice Sendak
IN 1963, Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are, a slim book of illustrations and 10 sentences of narrative about a misbehaving boy, Max, who is sent to his room without supper. Max imagines himself traveling to a land of wild creatures as raucous as himself, who crown him their king. It was condemned as a dangerous book by reviewers and influential psychiatrists, in part because Max’s mother loses her temper too and had failed to discipline her child. But children returned to borrow it from the library, and it soon entered the canon of American children’s literature.
Though the brief book offers oceans to the imagination, it puts forth little in the way of plot and thus seemed an unlikely movie adaptation. Sendak wanted to see it done, however, and throughout the course of 10 years frequently raised the issue with Spike Jonze, whom he had met while attempting to produce his own mentor Crockett Johnson’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon.
That project never came to fruition, but Jonze developed a friendship and appreciation for the author, filming conversations between them over time and piecing them into a short documentary for HBO, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.
In the documentary, the intimacy between the two men is transparent. They share a natural appreciation for each other’s work, but Jonze’s profound sense of play is offset by Sendak’s darker fixations with his own mortality, alienation, and inability to accept happiness.
During one revealing sequence, Sendak confides to Jonze, “It seems I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible height. It puzzles me deeply, and it sours my life. So there’s a permanent dissatisfaction . . . It’s like something is dead inside.” Jonze hugs the older man.
“I wish I could satisfy you as a friend,” Sendak offers.
“You are. You do.” “... And be a normal human being,” Sendak adds, smiling up at Jonze.
“I wish I could just strangle you and slap you,” concludes Jonze, “and make you realize you do find joy, and why isn’t that enough?” But in his documentary, Jonze explores the depths of Sendak’s solitude and perhaps even the source of Sendak’s “permanent dissatisfaction” as well as his artistry: “My obsession with death, which a lot of my friends laugh at because I’m always on it, comes from the Lindbergh baby and the idea that you could die as a child—it’s an infamous insight for a child. Infamous.” Jonze’s skateboarder manner brings light into their dynamic.
Their creative collaboration might beg a comparison with Jonze’s affinity for, and emotional bond with, a not dissimilarly burdened friend and collaborator, iconoclastic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Although seeming no less aware of life’s more painful propensities, Jonze broke ground in music videos, short films, and commercials.
His work exhibits childlike playfulness, often sardonic or tinged with pathos, but never heavy or lacking in wonder.
The Wild Things script is painted more in emotion than with plot; the journey itself is the nine-year-old Max’s trip Through his turbulent feelings, struggling to understand them and those of his divorced mother, who is desperate to simply maintain their lifestyle and keep her head above water. After Max acts out at home and bites her, he runs from the house and then sailboats to the land of the Wild Things. He lands ashore and creeps through the woods to find the creatures acting out their own frustrations and loneliness, ready emotions on their sleeves, while their actions, relationships, and difficulties mirror many of Max’s own back home.
Once Jonze found his own lodestar into the story, Jonze enlisted Dave Eggers in 2004. “Maurice was the first person to read each version of the screenplay, and he was our best editor and our strongest supporter,” remembers author Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), with whom Jonze eventually shared screenplay credit on Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps accordingly, Eggers published a novelization of the film, taking scenes and a backstory that didn’t make it into the final version.
“[Spike’s] the filmmaker, and I knew he was the one who would have to take whatever we wrote and spend the time and effort—years of it—to get it made,” Eggers explains. “So there was always vigorous discussion about any given line.
But I deferred to him, to his vision for the movie. Over the years, the movie evolved in the editing and tweaking, and the final movie has a lot of writing in it that Spike did after we finished writing together. In the end, Spike and I figure that the movie is more his version of Maurice’s book, and the novel is more my version.” There is something guileless and childlike about Jonze that would make him the obvious hire for an adaptation of Sendak’s work. The result is an unconventional film, to say the least, and a studio “learning to love and accept” the film he delivered to it, as Jonze has said—much like any parent must with an unruly but precocious child. “It’s like the studio was expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a girl,” he told the New York Times. “And now they’re learning to love and accept their daughter.” Rob Feld: What was your way into the story? What made it finally click?
Spike Jonze: I’ve known Maurice [Sendak] for 14 years, and whenever he’d bring it up I’d be very excited. It’s a book I loved, images that are deeply ingrained in my consciousness from when I was a little kid. It’s a powerful, original work that would be exciting but also daunting to adapt; I’d be deeply hesitant for all the same reasons. Twice I really thought about it; like a month where I’d brainstorm it and consider what I could bring to it—and at the end of the month, both times, I would call Maurice back and say, “I just don’t know what I could add storywise to this that would feel necessary.” I didn’t want to add something just to add something. Like, Wow, I get to make a movie about the Wild Things!
So both times, reluctantly, I passed. It was only the third time that I started thinking about it differently. What would the Wild Things be like? I started thinking about who they would be, and what they would be like when Max showed up and encountered them on the island, and less about what would happen. My first reaction was, Wouldn’t it be funny if they just talked like us? But that wasn’t really an idea for a movie.
Going further, I started thinking about them as us and as our wild emotions. As soon as that idea came in, it seemed like it was inherent in the book. Maybe I always knew that— though I never confirmed it with Maurice and don’t even know if it’s true—but it always seemed very true to me.
Max is emotionally wild in the beginning of the book, and I got really excited about this idea that he goes to this place where everything is wild; the geography is wild, the weather is wild. That started to make sense to me in terms of making a movie about what it’s like to be nine years old. The world is uncertain. You’re trying to navigate it all and decipher this place where you just arrived. There’s no map for it and things that are out of control are scary as a kid and still can be—certainly among [scary things] are the emotions you can’t control in the people around you and those inside yourself. Those are scary. When that came, it tumbled into something that had infinite possibilities in what you could write about it. Suddenly, the excitement far outweighed the hesitation and anxiety of it.
What did Sendak say to this?
I called Maurice, told him I was excited and that I had an idea that made me want to do it. We probably talked for two hours and one of the strongest things I remember him telling me came without any note of an artist protecting his work; it was a mandate pushing me to make something that was my own. He said that I need to make it personal and not make something that panders to children; to not be precious with the book. As for the book, when it came out, it was considered dangerous for children because of the way it showed Max’s and his mom’s behavior. The kid lost control of himSelf, but the mom lost control of herself also. She wasn’t there to help the child through his emotions. There wasn’t an easy lesson taught that you could walk away with, but it captured what it feels like to be a kid. For those reasons, that book was revolutionary. And for those same reasons, it still resonates so deeply with generations of kids.
I agreed, no mother should do that. But I also agree that mothers and children are human beings and they will lose their way occasionally and do the wrong thing and say the wrong thing.
Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want Once you made that decision, what was your subsequent development process? Did you start sketching out this constellation of characters/emotions?
For probably six months I wrote notes with no rhyme or reason. Images, ideas for characters, scenes, dialogue. Kind of like the way I write music video treatments; I’d put the song on and disappear into the song, writing any image that came to mind, not thinking about how they were going to go together. Just free associate off the feelings the song gave me.
Then I’d come back and look at this long list of ideas—most of which are bad—but one might make me say, Oh, that’s exciting! And that kind of goes with this thing; and those two things combined might make a strong idea. So I wrote in that form, no sense of what was going to stay or go, fit or not fit, or where it was really going. Then I came to Dave [Eggers] with probably 40 pages of images, notes, ideas, characters, dialogue, moments; some that were fully formed scenes, some that were fragments.
What did you articulate to him at that moment about what you were trying to do? The core idea, that each Wild Thing represents a wild emotion?
Probably, with a lot more details about what the characters were, who Max was. It was taking the book and going deeper into it. Who was Max and who were the Wild Things? Letting the plot and narrative come out of the characters and their relationships and interactions.
So you were still talking much more in terms of themes than plot?
At that point definitely more themes and scenes. We tried not to approach it from the outside in; not to approach it from an outline, then working out the scenes. We went the other way, which is probably more painful because you wind up writing and throwing out so much. We tried not to over-think it on the first draft. We wanted to write more like the way a kid would write—intuitively and from the gut. Then, as we wrote more drafts and got our heads above water, we got a different perspective; probably we did more construction. But the initial idea was to not think about it too much.
Were you trying to craft moments that might articulate a specific emotion, like abandonment or jealousy?
Honestly, I don’t know if initially we were that predetermined.
I can’t really remember. We rented a house, and I think got through the first draft in four months. Then we took a beat for the two of us to read it separately and come back together. But those first four months, we just started on page one and wrote. We would overthink things that didn’t make sense, like, Why is this character doing this? Or, Where is this character at? Trying to make this ensemble come to life, rather than just focusing on two characters. We didn’t want to shortchange the group dynamic, which we felt was powerful and important. This group is like an organism and a family, and they each come out of a different place. We’d write or improvise a scene, speaking the dialogue and writing it down, then go back and reread it.
So the stuff that mirrors his home life in the Wild Things’ world—like Max helping to literally destroy the homes being similar to his fear that he’s figuratively doing the same with his family—it sounds like you didn’t plan or outline that stuff, that it emerged more organically?
I think so. Some of those places naturally arrived, and Some we did when we went back to the script. We wrote in such a loose way, and we wrote so much—our first draft was really, really long and we didn’t question or edit it. We just went with it, knowing we could go back later from a more analytical place. I learned that from and was inspired by the way Charlie Kaufman writes. He doesn’t know where he’s going and just writes from his intuition and gut, and what he’s interested in, and just follows that through. The first pass of his scripts are sometimes 250 pages long before he goes and whittles it down. Watching him work and the way his brain makes connections was very inspiring.
In Wild Things there’s a detail that stuck with me of Max playing with his mom’s stocking under her desk, which was a scripted moment. Tell me how you use those.
In a film what captures your imagination, or my imagination, are all the little details that make it vivid and visceral. In The Black Stallion, which Maurice also loves, the little boy is sitting there holding the mane that had to be cut because he was holding onto it so tightly he passed out—it’s such a vivid detail, just the way he’s looking at it. That’s what makes a script be alive and exciting to film. Not generic. Specific. On some level every scene is made up of details. Sometimes you write or shoot stuff that doesn’t make it in, but it’s those details that help me know what the scene is and to be grounded in it. Even sometimes things that don’t make it into the script.
Maybe a specific visual detail or the texture of something. Or sometimes it’s an intention behind a character’s line. I sometimes overuse the parentheticals, putting in a whole line of description, and end up pulling those out before we shoot so I’m not overwhelming actors with that stuff. It’s more for me.
It could be a shot or a detail of what the character’s doing or a close-up that gives texture.
We’ve talked in the past about the subjective stance from which films like The Black Stallion and E.T. were presented. Wild Things is very much in that position.
I’m not sure there was even a discussion about it. I just think it was decided from the get-go that this was about being inside the head of a nine-year-old and feeling the world from his point of view. The confusion, excitement, anxiety, yearning— wherever he’s at, to be with him. We wrote a challenging role—I didn’t realize how challenging until we started auditioning kids—but I feel like with the role we wrote we were looking for a nine-year-old Sean Penn, somebody whose face you could hold on without him speaking and understand what he’s thinking and feeling, in a very complex, emotional way. It’s interesting because The Black Stallion obviously had an influence on me (a boy and a creature on an island, the subjectivity and the naturalism of the performance), but it also seeped into my consciousness in ways that weren’t as specific.
How did you talk about the thought processes and dialogue of the Wild Things themselves? “I have to eat my feet,” or childhood emotional things like, “It’s necessary to destroy the huts.” That’s always a hard thing to put into words and was at the time too. I knew it in my head but in talking about it, it was only through examples of what was and wasn’t their world.
There were specifics that we didn’t understand or relate to, but we understood the emotion of it or the feeling behind it. It’s my memory of the way I would experience the adult world, where you’re just picking up clues along the way about how everything works and what everything means. You’re picking up clues usually off of somebody’s emotional reaction to it; if it’s good or bad, dangerous, negative or positive. I don’t know if I was fully conscious of why we were writing it that way at the time, but now I can see more clearly what we were doing and give it some pseudointellectual analysis.
Did you go off to listen to the way kids speak?
At some point later on, I interviewed some kids, but not so much for the way they talked as for the way they thought.
We had already written the script, and it let me feel that we were sort of going in the right direction. [It reinforced] that the depth of kids’ emotions are just like ours, it’s just that the specifics and ability to understand it all are different. Talking to kids about things that they were scared of, or that upset them, or their nightmares and bad dreams. I wanted to make sure that we weren’t trying to overly burden Max with things that weren’t in the mind of a kid. But talking to kids reminded me that no, we weren’t.
I love that you have this really short scene where he’s playing in the school yard and you didn’t make him into the outcast, loner type, like you see in so many children’s movies. He’s a kid playing with other kids. Was that a decision?
It was definitely a conversation along the way. It’s not like he has major social problems, a loner. He’s a normal kid that we wanted to make this about. It wasn’t drawn out though. When we got to that page, we had that conversation and moved on.
People talk over each other a good deal in the movie, which is uncommon enough in commercial film, let alone one with an expected child audience. What was your influence or thought behind that? I’m fishing for Cassavetes.
Cassavetes wasn’t actually an influence in writing it.
The motivation for writing was more to be Max’s point of view on this island with all these Wild Things, just landing there and trying to decipher it. The way we shot it, too, always puts you in the middle of it as Max tries to take it all in, and we’re bursting out of the frame, always from below and from his point of view. The overlapping dialogue came from that place. As we were going to shoot it, it was Catherine Keener who suggested we watch Cassavetes movies. We watched Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence and got excited about that idea of how alive it feels when you can get performances like that. It was an influence and inspiration in shooting the dialogue more than writing the dialogue. There wasn’t a lot of stuff for the writing that came from other movies. There’s other movies we loved that we thought had done it really well, but we weren’t analyzing them to see how they did it, that this worked or didn’t, or that we could do that better, or learn from their mistakes.
We weren’t writing from that place. We were more trying to feel who Max was and understand how we could make a movie that felt like being nine could feel like at times.
I think what I offered was different but not because I drew better than anybody or wrote better than anybody, but because I was more honest than anybody. In the discussion of children and the lives of children and the fantasies of children and the language of children, I said anything I wanted because I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe there’s this demarcation, “You mustn’t tell them that! You mustn’t tell them that!” You can tell them anything you want if it’s true.
Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want So you really set out more to make a movie about being nine than to make a children’s movie, whatever that is. In the short documentary you made about Maurice, he talks about how he doesn’t believe in childhood, in delineaTions of what is appropriate for children or not, other than the truth.
My friends would ask me, “So wait, it’s a children’s movie?” I really didn’t know how to answer. Of course I wanted children to see it, but I wasn’t writing it for an audience in that way. That’s again sort of coming at it from the outside, and, again, working with Charlie, we never did that. Our other movies are in the comedy section in the video store, but we never looked at them as comedies or classified them in any way. We were just making what we wanted to make. I knew this would be in the children’s section of the video store, but the goal was to make something that felt like childhood.
Kids respect and respond to being told the truth, even if they can’t fully digest it.
Yeah! And it’s weird—I think about movies I loved as a kid. I was about 11 when I saw The World According to Garp, but for some reason I totally identified with that movie!
They lose a son in a car wreck while the mom is giving a blowjob to some other man. It’s totally intense, but I think the spirit of Garp and his relationship with his mom, I totally related to. I didn’t relate to the specifics—I related to what he felt. He’s trying to be light, but life doesn’t always allow him to be light. The experience of life and the things that happen to you as you go through life, even as a kid you feel that sort of tug. As a kid you can listen to a song you don’t necessarily understand. I remember as a kid, like seven years old, loving the song “I Will Survive.” For some reason I loved that song, and when my mom wasn’t home, I’d put it on really loud and sing along to it. Or “The Day The Music Died,” at seven years old. Those are songs that, as a kid, you don’t fully understand the experience that the songwriter is writing about, but you fully understand the feeling the songwriter is writing about. And, speaking for myself, as a kid I gravitated toward like, That’s a feeling I know. And you crave that. And that’s why I would sing along to “I Will Survive” at top volume. You kind of know what the song’s about, but that’s not what it’s totally about to you. It’s about the sentiment of being scared and alone, and coming back and being able to do anything, and being self-empowered. Those are feelings kids totally relate to and I related to—being alone, feeling self-empowered, and triumphing over it.
Things are never in Max’s control, even when he’s king. He’s just trying to keep up. His life is constantly under threat. KW [a Wild Thing] becomes a safe place for him, is never a threat, though there is an earlier version of the script where she too doesn’t want to let him go after hiding him in her mouth; there’s a moment of panic before she finally releases him.
I guess I’m less into analyzing how things changed. But more generally, you start out wanting to include all your ideas, then the fight is to try and include as many of them as possible while not burying your movie in them. The movie at a certain point rejects the things that don’t belong there, in the same way a body would reject an organ. It’s your job as a filmmaker to listen to that or try to keep forcing it in there.
Tell me about the secret life of children as it relates to Wild Things and the delineation between Max’s fantasy world and that with his family. We once spoke about a brutal fight you saw as a child, which made no sense and terrified you as you hid, watching, but you didn’t tell your mother about it.
I guess my experience of being a kid was not knowing how to talk about these things. You’re reading all these things as a kid. When people are talking, there’s two levels of communication going on—one is the spoken and the other is the unspoken.
Things are being implied by the intonation or body language or expression, and kids are so in tune with that, eating it all up. Even if they’re being told one thing they’re feeling another. That’s why Maurice comes back to “be honest with them.” Because they see it all, though they’re getting messages not to talk about this or that. I guess the difference is that as adults we feel a lot of the same things, but as we’ve gotten older we’ve formed a construct in which we’re going to navigate the world and relationships.
Hopefully, it’s still changing and we’re open to change. But at that age you haven’t formed that yet, you don’t have a construct to decipher and navigate all this stuff.
The range of emotions Max and the Wild Things experience in the film felt very raw and familiar to me even now, as an adult.
We’re not all that different. It’s exciting to hear you say that. Our goal was simple: to make an experiential movie that feels like what it felt like to me being a kid.
There was a time not so long ago when Dave Eggers didn’t do interviews. Or rather, he would only do them by email. This was after a row with a New York Times journalist that ended with Eggers calling him a ‘bitter little b-----d’. All of which makes me feel rather nervous as I wait outside the office at his British publishers, where Eggers is waiting.
He turns out to be a chunky, outdoorsy-looking man of 39, wearing hiking boots and with dark, curly hair that’s only partially tamed by a centre parting. But he seems in a thoroughly affable mood – even if this will later be punctured by long bursts of frowning introspection.
For all his affability, Eggers, you suspect, has a pretty dark side – which will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has read his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In the book, Eggers described how, aged 21, he brought up his eight-year-old brother Christopher – ‘Toph’. This was after their parents both died of cancer within weeks of one another.
Ten years after it was published, Eggers is a literary star. He’s written a novel, film scripts, two non-fiction novels and numerous short stories.
He’s also founded the most influential literary magazine in the United States, McSweeney’s. But childhood – his own childhood – still churns away inside him, which is why he teamed up with film director Spike Jonze to make the recent film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. As well as writing the script, Eggers has also written a novel, The Wild Things, a kind of companion piece to the movie, but very different from it.
Eggers remembers first reading Where the Wild Things Are when he was five and being absolutely terrified. What scared him so much? ‘Argh…’ he says, throwing up his hands. ‘I just reacted with pure terror. But then I used to hide under the couch during The Wizard of Oz. I think what frightened me the most was that I couldn’t work out if the Wild Things were nice or nasty. There was a moral ambiguity to them which really disturbed me.’
His own upbringing was much less riven with uncertainty – at least on the surface. Eggers grew up in a prosperous Chicago suburb where his father was an attorney and his mother a schoolteacher. But behind the happy façade, all was not well: his father drank and spent long periods out of work.
‘I can remember very clearly being seven or eight, which is the age the boy, Max, is in the book. And when I was raising my brother, that started off when he was eight – so it’s a very vivid moment that I’ve thought about a lot. I can remember feeling responsible for my mother’s happiness. If she was sad, I would think: “Can I do my robot manoeuvre and make her happy?” And slowly you come to realise that there’s only so much you can do.’
Eggers’s childhood was also weirdly cloistered. In all the time he was growing up, his parents never went out in the evening. ‘Not once. Isn’t that extraordinary? But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalise all that chaos.
'For years, I resisted keeping any kind of schedule. Because my parents were very rigid and everything happened at a set time every day, I really fought against that. I mean, I didn’t even have a wallet until I was 27.’
When Eggers wrote The Wild Things, he basically turned himself into Max – except that the young Dave Eggers was much, much wilder than his fictional counterpart. ‘I think I was pretty crazy, looking back. For instance, when I was a kid we used to do stuff like soaking tennis balls in kerosene and playing football with them. At the same time, though, I remember being quite good in school and also fairly docile. So there are all these weird contradictions that are hard to reconcile.’
But he probably wouldn’t have written the book had he not got a phone call from Sendak, now 81, the original creator of Where the Wild Things Are. ‘Maurice was very involved in the film and he told me that people had been talking about a novel based on the screenplay. He asked me if I’d do it. I had to think about it, but I thought it might be a good place to explore all those thoughts that I’ve had about childhood.’
Eggers has a breathy, laconic way of talking that gives everything he says a carefully measured air, a sense of being repeatedly pored over. He’s plainly pored over Where the Wild Things Are in microscopic detail – first as a terrified child and now as a father. He and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, have two small children, a girl and a boy.
‘I wrote it between our two children being born. I wanted to write something that might have the same sort of effect on a kid as the books I read when I was young had on me. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s like the cement is still wet when you’re that age; every little mark can become permanent.’
Fatherhood has brought other changes, too. When Eggers first started writing, he used to do so between midnight and 5am – always in what he calls a desperate, over-caffeinated, blood-strewn, tear-your-own-ear-off sort of way. ‘I had this romantic idea that I had to be at the end of my rope. But now with kids, I have to work bankers’ hours. Believe me, it’s hard to think of anything less romantic – or more sedentary.’
‘Even now, when I start something, I never think I’ll ever be able to get to the end, or that it will make any sense,’ he says. ‘Actually, The Wild Things is the first book I’ve ever written where I enjoyed it. Normally, there’ll be about one day a month where I think: “Wow, I had a good time today.” But with this, I just sat there chortling away.’
Eggers was in his mid-twenties when he started on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and if his confidence remains shaky now, it was in a far worse state then. ‘I remember turning in some chapters to an editor and when he said he liked them, I said: “What are you talking about?” I even accused him of not doing his job properly.
'Then when it came out, I felt so conflicted – partly because the title was so ironic. I just thought it would be funny to give the book this grandiose title when, of course, it’s a disaster. I thought about three people would read it and that would be the end of it.’
Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Even now, Eggers says, barely a day goes by without someone coming up and saying how much the book means to them. Not that this makes him feel much better.
‘I’ve had a really complicated relationship with it for some years. In a lot of ways the guy in it is me, but also he isn’t. We were very private people, my family, and that kind of self-revelation is something that was not in any way native to them. In a lot of ways, writing it was an act of rebellion.’
One of the reasons Eggers feels so ambivalent about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is because of what subsequently happened to his sister, Beth. When the book was published, she accused him of downplaying her role in their brother’s upbringing and beefing up his own. She later recanted saying she’d made a dreadful mistake – ‘I’m so embarrassed. I was having a terrible LaToya Jackson moment.’ Then, in November 2001, Beth Eggers committed suicide.
Eggers has never talked about his sister’s death. But it seems telling that he’s opted to write two books since in which trust has played the key role. In both What is the What and Zeitoun – out here next March – he is telling someone else’s story.
Zeitoun is the story of a Muslim family from Syria. Abdulrahman Zeitoun stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, after which he saved the lives of several survivors, only to be interned as a suspected terrorist.
‘As far as I was concerned, I was there to tell their stories,’ Eggers says. ‘But if there was something they didn’t want in, then obviously I’d respect that. I suppose the most important thing with both books was to do no harm – unless it was harm to the Bush administration, which I was absolutely fine with.’
When he’s not sitting on his couch being sedentary, Eggers leads an extremely busy life. He’s the founder of 826 Valencia, a tutoring centre in San Francisco where children between the ages of six and 18 can go to develop their writing skills. He also has a shop in San Francisco that sells nothing but pirate gear.
Then there’s McSweeney’s, which publishes a quarterly literary magazine, a website, a monthly magazine called The Believer and a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. All Eggers’s proceeds from What is the What went to Sudanese refugees in the US, while those from Zeitoun are going to the Zeitoun Foundation, which is helping in the rebuilding of New Orleans.
Eggers has also become a tireless campaigner for the power of the printed word in an internet age. His magazines aren’t afraid of publishing novella-length stories and his books luxuriate in the kind of playful design that could never be reproduced on a screen.
He’s clearly seeking to do as much good as possible and I wondered how much his faith in human nature fluctuates between optimism and despair. ‘I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum. Because I grew up with this naïve expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation. But however naïve I might be, I do feel that books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: “Let’s not forget this.”’
He breaks off. Our time is up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m babbling again. That’s the thing with me, you see. I never end tidily. I just kind of trail off…'
For more than 40 years, kids have wondered about Where the Wild Things Are. Are they real or imaginary? Friends or foes? Now that we're grown-ups, we still can't help you, but we may have figured out where they really are: living with author Maurice Sendak in his Connecticut home. The front door is flanked by Wild Thing statuettes; vintage stuffed monsters and framed posters fill the living room. There's even a bronze sculpture of Max and his sailboat in the center of the kitchen table. The always acerbic Sendak, 81, inhabits the world of the Wild Things as fully as any child—he actually placed an order for a Wild Things parka during our interview—so we couldn't wait to ask him about Spike Jonze's big-budget, live-action movie based on the book. To discuss the dark, unorthodox adaptation, Sendak invited us over, along with Jonze and novelist-screenwriter Dave Eggers (who participated via speakerphone from San Francisco) for an exclusive group interview:
What makes a good kids' story? Sendak: How would I know? I just write the books. But I do know that my parents were immigrants and they didn't know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them, we absolutely loved them. But the three of us—my sister, my brother, and myself—grew up very depressed people.
Dave, do you rememberWhere the Wild Things Arefrom your childhood? Eggers: I do. I remember when I was really little, I was scared of everything—Willy Wonka scared me to death, and the Oompa-Loompa people scared me to death. When I was 3 and 4, I would leave the room and hide under the couch when those movies came on. My first experience with Where the Wild Things Are—I couldn't read it. And my mother thought I would love it, because I was that barbaric kid that Maurice was talking about—really hyper and wild. But it scared me, mainly because of the nuances of the monsters. It just wasn't clear if they were good or bad, if they were going to eat Max or not.
The monsters were based on adults, right? Sendak: The monsters were based on relatives. They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook. Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically. They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate. So there you go.
Maurice, what did you think when you first saw the movie? Sendak: I thought it was never going to end. [Laughter] I say that to be funny. The truth of the matter is, I saw immediately a combination of things that I wanted and I loved. The courage of the child, the danger of the situation—it could turn on a dime. They could have eaten him. All of that was apparent right from the start. The artistry was something they would have to take care of. I was happy right from the beginning. I didn't have to suffer like they did—schlepping from this place to that place, dealing with the studio.
One disagreement you had is that in the book, Max stays in his room. In the film, he runs away from home. Sendak: It was one of my favorite scenes in the book. It was so much about the ability of children to imagine themselves in another place. He was a prisoner, locked in his room by his mother. And by his imagination he was able to get through those few hours where he was isolated and trapped. That's how I saw it. But there was something so totally valid in what Spike was doing. I remember I was having fights with my editor about this book.
What were the fights about? Sendak: Well, I'll just give you a silly example. The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word "hot" to "warm" on the last page. Because "hot" meant "burn."
Jonze: The soup was "still hot."
Sendak: It was going to burn the kid. I couldn't believe it. But it turned into a real world war, just that word, and I won.
How did you win? Sendak: Just going at it. Just trying to convey how dopey "warm" sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is "hot."
Spike, did you have fights like that when you were making this film? With the studio, not with Maurice. Jonze: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Eggers: No, there were no fights! [Laughter] No! Sorry, go ahead.
Jonze: Yeah. The big disagreement is that they thought I was making a children's film and I thought I was making a film about childhood, and so, along the way ...
Eggers: Keep dancing, Spike!
Jonze: I mean, I think it's a film—I want children to see it, and it's not like I made it not for children, and it'll be on the video shelf under CHILDREN'S, but I didn't come at it that way. I came at it from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. In the end, though, the studio let us make the movie we wanted to make.
Sendak: It's really an American problem.
What do you mean? Sendak: Europeans have done films about children, like The 400 Blows or My Life as a Dog, which is one of the most wonderful movies ever. It's tough to watch his suffering when his mother is dying and he scoots under the bed. That's the kind of way they have of dealing with children and they always have. We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don't want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that's never our intention.
Do you think Disney is bad for children? Sendak: I think it's terrible.
But you have all the Disney characters on your mantel behind you. Sendak: I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk. I stood on the chair screaming, "My hero! My hero!" He had a lot of guts when he was young. We're both about the same age; we're about a month apart. He was the little brother I always wanted.
Jonze: What was he like when he was young?
Sendak: He had teeth.
Jonze: Literally?
Sendak: He had literally teeth. I have toys in the other room.
Jonze: Was he more dangerous?
Sendak: Yes. He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened, was that he became so popular—this is my own theory—they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.
What do you say to parents who think theWild Thingsfilm may be too scary? Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate.
Because kids can handle it? Sendak: If they can't handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered.
Jonze: Dave, you want to field that one?
Eggers: The part about kids wetting their pants? Should kids wear diapers when they go to the movies? I think adults should wear diapers going to it, too. I think everyone should be prepared for any eventuality.
Sendak: I think you're right. This concentration on kids being scared, as though we as adults can't be scared. Of course we're scared. I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep. It never stops. We're grown-ups; we know better, but we're afraid.
Why is that important in art? Sendak: Because it's truth. You don't want to do something that's all terrifying. I saw the most horrendous movies that were unfit for child's eyes. So what? I managed to survive.
Jonze: It's interesting because at this point it's being talked about. I met some guy on the subway the other day—I was waiting on the subway platform for the F train the other day, and this guy comes up to me who's roughly my age, and he said, "Is the F train running today? God, I've been waiting here forever, and I've got to get down to this record store. It's the only used-CD store in town." And he was very friendly, nice guy, so I was talking to him about used-CD stores, then the guy was like, "You know what movie I can't wait to see is Where the Wild Things Are." And I was looking at him, trying to see—is he just messing with me now? Does he know that I made this? Or is this sincere? And so I just listened to him talk for a minute, and I said, "What made you say that?" And he said, "Oh, because I used to skate a lot, and it made me think, the director's a skateboarder, and I like his stuff," and I was like, "Uh-huh." And so I'm still waiting to see, is he messing with me? And he keeps talking about the movie, and how he's heard about it, and he's like, "The movie's amazing." And I asked if he'd seen it, and he was like, "No, but I saw the trailer. I know it's controversial—they said it's controversial. I think something really crazy happens at the end." [Laughter] And at this point, I'm still trying to figure out if he's messing with me, so I'm like, "Are you f--king with me?" "No, no, they said it's controversial," and then he's going on, and he's telling me how the director made all these music videos, he made skate videos, and I finally realize that he is just genuinely being sincere, and this conversation's gone on for 10 minutes, and I finally say, "I'm Spike, I'm the director," and he just looked at me for a minute and he got really sincere and he's like, "Oh, so why is it controversial?" [Laughter]
Eggers: I think there's plenty of kids who have grown up with a different type of children's movie, but my daughter, since she's been a year, her favorite movie's been The Wizard of Oz, and her favorite part's been the sepia-toned part at the beginning. Once it gets bright she loses interest a little bit.
Sendak: That is so fascinating that she likes the beginning more than the rest of it, because the beginning is so scary. One, the sepia tone itself tells you to expect something stormy. The fact that they all unwittingly abandon her. Her aunt doesn't have time for her. Bert Lahr [the Cowardly Lion] doesn't have time for her. No one has time for her. And her being alone, even for that brief time—how terrifying that must be for her. It surely was for me.
Eggers: And that lady takes her dog, goes off with it, but I think that my daughter's favorite part is when Toto jumps out of the basket, runs home, and jumps through the window, and I think that's what she's always waiting for is that there's something at stake there and the dog might be gone forever but ultimately good triumphs, even though the next thing that happens is the house being picked up in a vortex. But there is something at stake, and ultimately kids do want something at stake.
Sendak: I've always had a private theory that when she gets home and she's in bed, and Frank Morgan [the Wizard], at the window, says something like, "Is she all right?" And her uncle makes it clear that they might lose her. It goes by very quickly, but then she tries to tell them her adventure, she tries to tell them what it was like when she was in Oz, and her aunt says, "It's all right, Dorothy, just lie down." In truth, the grown-ups just don't want to hear her death fantasy. They don't want to think that Dorothy could be in so much trouble that she might not survive. And she lays back in bed and says, "There's no place like home." And there were people who were very critical of that—sentimental—but for me it was pure irony. There is no place like home. Where the hell else is she gonna go? It's the opposite of sentimental—it's the hard truth. Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid. That movie is unbelievably great.
Do you think it could hurt a child's imagination to read a book and then see the movie, like there's only one way to see the world they imagined? Eggers: Every kid I've ever talked to says the same thing, which is that the book was better—no offense, Spike.
Jonze: Oh, s--t. [Laughter] Kids are so fiercely opinionated, that if they love the Harry Potter books and they go see the movie, they'll be the first to say, "That was wrong! They didn't get that right!" They're storytellers themselves. They're critics. They're going to have the critical opinion.
Dave, what's the difference between writing a movie and a novel? Eggers: Writing this script couldn't be more different than sitting alone and writing a novel. With Spike and I, we were really in the room together for eight hours a day, and writing for at least 20 minutes of that. We really examined and fought over every word as we went along. Before we put any dialogue down, we had talked for weeks about who each character was and what they were motivated by, and what did Douglas want, what was his relationship with Carol, what would they do in this situation together. Spike had to make sure these characters were as deep and real as possible. We had whole backstories for each one of them.
How did you name them? Jonze: Dave and I named them. We took the book and went to Kinko's and blew up big poster-size images of each spread. Our dining-room walls were covered with every spread of the book. As we'd write, we'd look at the images, just sort of soaking it in. It was a process of going back to the book and sitting and listening to the character. You realized how certain characters came and went in the book. The characters appearing and disappearing, it makes it more wild.
Maurice, you never had names for the characters? Sendak: I never wanted them to have names. When it was an opera and the director and I were working on it during rehearsal, we had to have names to tell them when they were screwing up. They had Jewish names: Moishe, Schmuel. You have to remember this is an English opera house. We were all speaking Yiddish. It was very funny. But the names were dropped after the opera. They never had names until they became movie stars.
Ya resignado a ver pocas películas, el domingo me dediqué a recorrer un poco la ciudad. A las 4 de la tarde me habían invitado a un evento del festival que consistía en mostrar una película en una favela. Se imaginarán que "el turismo de la pobreza" es una entidad que me resulta deplorable y la sola idea de ir adentro de un bus con una serie de periodistas europeos a ver una función de este tipo y luego volver, imagino, casi sin salir del bus, era cercano a una pesadilla. Pero reconozco que me vi obligado a aceptar el convite: me habían invitado al festival, no había visto una sola película y me pareció que era un gesto un poco grosero de mi parte rechazar también esta invitación.
Pero la suerte estuvo conmigo, se largo a llover y "el paseo" se canceló. Y de paso se canceló también una cena posterior. Obviamente sacar entradas para ver películas en el día era una tarea imposible, ya era tarde para ir a la videoteca del Pavillion del festival (que está muy bien puesto, pero queda en el centro de la ciudad, a casi media hora de micro del hotel) y la opción volvía a ser el turismo.
Ya a la vuelta, y acaso con cierta culpa por no haber visto ninguna película, me puse a ver una que había traído de casa y que estaba programada en el festival: una forma curiosa, y cada vez más habitual, que tenemos muchos de hacer un festival paralelo gracias al download y a los DVDs y screeners. Vi "Away We Go", de Sam Mendes, basada en una historia de Dave Eggers y su esposa Vendela Vida. No voy a decir que me decepcionó porque nunca espero mucho de una película de Mendes, pero sí esperaba un poco más del escritor de una de mis novelas favoritas de los últimos años, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius".
"Away We Go" cuenta la historia de una pareja (los simpáticos John Krasinski y Maya Rudolph) que, al quedar embarazados, empiezan una recorrida por los Estados Unidos y Canadá en una especie de "casting" para elegir en que lugar vivir. A algunas ciudades irán por cuestiones laborales y a otras --la mayoría-- porque allí viven familiares y/o amigos. El tour será una especie de freak road show en el que la pareja irá viendo lo imbéciles, perdidos, confundidos y desesperados que están sus conocidos. Salvo excepciones, se podría decir que uno es más patético que el otro.
No termino de entender el sentido de la película. La pareja protagónica es carismática y agradable, pero el recorrido es una cadena de banalidades, una serie de viñetas ridículas que llegan al colmo del mal gusto y la mala leche con el encuentro que tienen con Maggie Gyllenhaal y su marido. ¿Ver el estado semipsicótico, autista, frustrado de todos los demás servirá para que la pareja consolide su relación? ¿O para que el espectador se sienta a la par de ellos y mejor que el resto de los tarados que pululan por la pantalla?
Las canciones de Alexi Murdoch --bonitas, pero casi calcadas de Nick Drake-- tienen cierto encanto, pero la película es un viaje a ninguna parte. Esperemos que el combo Eggers-Jonze en "Where the Wild Things Are" sea mejor que el de Eggers y Mendes, director cuyo manejo de los tonos de la "comedia irónica" (por llamarla de alguna manera) va empeorando desde "American Beauty", película similar en ciertos aspectos pero que --a la distancia-- parece el colmo del refinamiento.
El lunes volví al turismo hasta las 4 de la tarde, hora en la que llegué al cine de Botafogo para ver "The White Ribbon", la película de Michael Haneke que ganó la Palma de Oro. No quiero seguir "echando leña al fuego" porque, es cierto, la prioridad para los invitados internacionales es que vean cine brasileño, pero me topé con la película con subtítulos en portugués. Y ningún otro. Digamos que en mi caso, y calculo que en el de muchos argentinos, leer portugués no es algo tan complicado de hacer, y salvo un par de frases, no creo haberme perdido nada. Pero imagino que no sería tan fácil para un inglés, un francés o un norteamericano.
El problema mayor es otro: la película estaba en un formato digital que, apuesto, no es el original. Estuve averiguando y sé que Haneke ha presentado copias en fílmico y en digital, pero puedo apostar que no era en este formato digital, cuyo evidente pixelado de la imagen dejaba ver que era algún tipo de copia en un soporte de menor calidad o mayor compresión. Leí decenas de artículos sobre la calidad de la imagen del filme y eso me deja en claro que la copia que vi no tiene nada que ver con la original.
Pero ahora me costaría entrar en un análisis largo de la película --son casi las dos de la mañana y estoy esperando la votación del Senado en la Ley de Medios--, por lo que la voy a dejar para mañana. Sólo me da para adelantar que, como también espero muy poco de Haneke (no me gusta nada de lo que hizo después de "Código Desconocido"), puedo decir que la película me interesó más de lo que esperaba. No cambia en nada la opinión que tengo del director austríaco --de hecho, la reafirma-- y el suyo es un cine que no me interesa, que funciona de manera didáctica (traduce ideas preconcebidas en imágenes que sirven como "pruebas" de algún tipo de teoría sociológica) y cruel, pero algunas cosas me resultaron intrigantes, especialmente cuestiones de la puesta en escena, como el uso del fuera de campo y las elipsis narrativas. Pero sigo con el asunto mañana...
Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort. First of all, bunk beds have a roof, and a roof is essential if you’re going to have an observation tower. And you need an observation tower if you’re going to spot invading armies before they breach your walls and overtake your kingdom. Anyone without a bunk bed would have a much harder time maintaining a security perimeter, and if you can’t do that you don’t stand a chance.
Max had just done a quick survey of the area surrounding his bunk kingdom and was now down on the lower bunk, where he could be unseen and unknown. For a while, he thought about what his science teacher had been talking about earlier that day—that someday the sun would die. Mr. Malhotra had sensed that the mood in the class was darkening, that he’d scared his third graders, and had tried to brighten things: “What am I talking about? I’m being such a downer. Don’t worry about the sun dying! You and everyone you know will be long gone by then!”
It was a very strange time in Max’s life. The day before, his sister had tried, by proxy, to kill him. Her tobacco-chewing friends had chased him into his snow fort, and at the moment when he felt safest, in the cool white hollow, they had jumped on the roof, burying him. His sister had done nothing to help, and then had driven off with them, and to punish her, because she was no longer his sister, he’d doused her room with water. Buckets and buckets he’d emptied everywhere, in a furious, joyous process. It had been great, and felt so right, until his mother came home and found what he’d done. She was mad, Claire was mad, and so, tonight, the only person in the house who seemed to like him was his mom’s chinless boyfriend, Gary, and even thinking that sent a shudder through him.
Max, tired of thinking in his brain, decided to think on paper, and so retrieved his journal from under the bed. His father had given him the journal shortly after he left—how long ago now? Three years?—and had, in white-out, written the words “WANT JOURNAL” on the cover. In this book his father had written as inscription and directive, “Write what you want. Every day, or as often as you can, write what you want. That way, whenever you’re confused or rudderless, you can look to this book, and be reminded where you want to go and what you’re looking for.” His father had printed, by hand, three beginnings on every page.
Max found a pen and began:
IWANT Gary to fall into some kind of bottomless hole. IWANT Claire to get her foot caught in a bear trap. IWANT Claire’s friends to die by flesh-eating tapeworms.
Then he stopped. His father had explained that the journal was for positive wants, not negative wants. When you wanted something negative, it didn’t count, he said. A want should improve your life while improving the world, even if just a little bit.
So Max began again:
IWANT to get out of here. IWANT to go to the moon or some other planet. IWANT to find some unicorn DNA and then grow a bunch of them and teach them to impale Claire’s friends with their horns.
Oh, well. He could erase it later. Just writing it felt good. But now he was sick of writing. He wanted to do something. But what did he want to do? This was the central question of this day and most days.
Max caught sight of his wolf suit hanging on the back of the closet door. He hadn’t worn it in weeks. He’d gotten it for Christmas three years before, the last one with both his parents, and he’d immediately put it on, and kept it on for the rest of school break. It had been too big then, but his mom had pinned it and taped it to make it work until he grew into it.
Now he and it were the perfect size, and he wore it when he knew he was alone in the house and could wrestle the dog or jump and growl without anyone watching. Although the house was now full—his mother in the kitchen making dinner, Claire in the TV room pretending to do her homework, Gary on the couch in the living room—as Max stared at the wolf suit it seemed to be calling to him. It’s time, it was saying to Max. He wasn’t sure this was actually the right time to put it on, but then again he usually felt better wearing it. He felt faster, sleeker, more powerful.
On the other hand, he could stay in bed. He could stay in the fort, the red blanket casting a red light on everything inside. He could miss dinner and stay there all night. All weekend. He had some thinking to do, about this news about the sun expiring and the resulting void inhaling the earth, and he wanted to steer clear of Claire, who might yet want retribution, and he was angry at his mom, who seemed to forget for hours at a time that he existed. And any time he spent in his room was time he didn’t have to spend with Gary.
So he had a choice. Would he stay behind the curtain and think about things, marinate in his own confusion, or would he put on his white fur suit and howl and scratch and make it known who was boss of this house and of all the world known and unknown?
“Arrrooooooo! ”
The howling was a good start. Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence. Max, in his white wolf suit, stood at the top of the stairs and, using a rolled-up piece of construction paper as a megaphone, howled again, as loud as he could.
“Arrrooooooooooooo! ”
When he was done, there was a long silence.
“Uh-oh,” Gary finally said from the living room.
Ha! Max thought. Let Gary worry. Let everyone worry.
He pounded down the stairs, triumphant. “Who wants to get eaten?” he asked the house and the world.
“Not me,” Claire said from the TV room.
Aha! Max decided. That only puts her higher on the menu!
He strode into the TV room. He lifted his claws up, growled, and sniffed at the air. He wanted to make sure that Claire and everyone knew this terrible fact: there was a bloodthirsty, brilliant, borderline-insane wolf in their midst.
Claire, seeing Max approach, rolled her eyes.
“You want me to kill something for you?” he asked.
Claire thought a moment, tapping her pencil against her lower teeth. She looked at Max, her eyes bright. “Yeah,” she said. “Go kill the little man in the living room.”
“Yeah,” Max said, getting excited. “We’ll cut his brains out and make him eat ’em! He’ll have to think from his stomach!”
Claire gave Max a look she might give a three-headed cat. “Yeah, you go do that,” she said.
Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
Max was about to leap upon Gary, to show him just what kind of animal he was—a wolf capable of tearing flesh from bone with a shake of his jaws—when Max’s mom came into the room. She was carrying two glasses of blood-colored wine, and she handed one to Gary. Gary sat up, smiled his powerless smile, and clinked his glass against hers. “Cheers, little rabbit-dude,” he said, raising his glass to Max.
Max’s mom smiled at Max and then at Gary.
“Cheers, Maxie,” she said, and growled playfully at him.
She picked up a dirty plate and hurried back toward the kitchen. “Claire!” she yelled. “I asked you to get your stuff off the table. It’s almost dinner.”
Max entered the kitchen with hisarms crossed, marching purposefully, like a general inspecting his troops. He sniffed loudly, assessing the kitchen’s smells and waiting to be noticed.
His mother said nothing, so he brought a chair near the stove and stood on it. Now they were eye to eye.
“What is that? Is that food?” he asked, pointing down to something beige sitting numbly on a plate.
He got no answer.
“Mom, what is that?” he asked, now grabbing her arm.
“Pâté,” she said.
Max snickered and moved on. Pâté was a regrettable name for an unfortunate food. It seemed to Max a good idea to get up from the chair and to leap onto the counter. Which he presently did.
Standing on the counter, he towered over everything and everyone. He was eleven feet tall.
“Oh, God,” Max’s mom said.
Max squatted down to inspect a package of frozen corn. “Frozen corn? What’s wrong with real corn?” he demanded. He dropped the package loudly on the counter, where it made a wonderful clatter.
“Frozen corn is real,” Max’s mom said, barely taking notice. “Now get off the counter. And go tell your sister to get her stuff off the table.”
Max didn’t move. “CLAIRE GET YOUR STUFF OFF THE TABLE!” he yelled, more or less into his mom’s face.
“Don’t yell in my face!” she hissed. “And get off the counter.”
Instead of getting off the counter, Max howled. The acoustics where he was, so close to the ceiling, were not great.
His mom stared at him like he was crazy. Which he was, because wolves are part crazy. “You know what?” she said. “You’re too old to be on the counter, and you’re too old to be wearing that costume.”
Max crossed his arms and glared at her. “You’re too old to be so short! And your makeup’s smeared!”
“GeT DOWN from there!” she demanded.
“Woman, feed me!” he yelled. He didn’t know where he’d come up with that phrase, but he liked it immediately.
“Get off the counter, Max!”
“I’ll eat you up!” he growled, raising his arms.
“MAX! GET DOWN!” she yelled. She could be very loud when she wanted to be. For a second, he thought he should get off the counter, take off his suit, and eat his dinner quietly, because the truth was he was very hungry. But then he thought better of it, and howled again.
“Arrrooooooooo! ”
At that, Max’s mom lunged for him, but he was able to elude her grasp. He leaped over the sink and then back down onto the chair. She lunged again and missed. Max cackled. He really was fast! He jumped down, landed on the floor, and executed a perfect shoulder roll. Then he got up and fled from the kitchen, laughing hysterically.
When he turned around, though, he found that his mom was still chasing him. That was new. She rarely chased him this far. When they raced through the living room, Gary took notice of the escalating volume and urgency. He put down his glass of wine and got ready to intervene.
Then, in the front hall, a surprising and awful thing happened: Max’s mom caught him.
“Max!” she gasped.
She had his arm firmly in her hand. She had long fingers, shockingly strong, and they dug into Max’s biceps. In her hand, all his muscle and sinew turned to soup, and he didn’t like it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed. “You see what you’re doing to me?” Her voice was shrill, corkscrewed.
“No, you’re doing things!” he countered, sounding meeker than he’d intended. To offset this sign of weakness, he thrashed around in her grip.
“There’s no way you’re eating dinner with us. Animal.”
Now, because he was angry at having Gary in the house, and angry at having to eat pâté and frozen corn, and angry about having a witch for a sister, he growled and—the idea flooding him so quickly he couldn’t resist—bit his mom’s arm as hard as he could.
She screamed. She stepped back, holding her arm. Max had never bitten her before. He was scared. His mom was scared. They saw each other anew. Max turned to see Gary entering the foyer. He was clearly unsure what he was supposed to do.
“He bit me!” she spat.
Gary’s eyes bulged. He turned to Max’s mom. “You can’t let him treat you this way!”
“He’s not allowed to talk here!” Max yelled, pointing to the frog-eyed man.
Then Claire stormed into the hall. Seeing Claire and Gary and his mom, everyone looking at him like he was the problem, sent Max tumbling over the edge. He screamed as loud as he could, producing a sound between a howl and a battle cry.
“Why are you doing this to me?” his mom wailed. “This house is chaos with you in it!”
That was it. Max did not have to stand for this, any of this, all of this. He threw open the door and leaped down the porch and into the night.
T he air! The moon!
He felt pulled as if by an outgoing tide. The air and the moon together sang a furious and wonderful song: Come with us, wolf-boy! Let us drink the blood of the earth and gargle it with great aplomb! Max tore down the street, feeling free, knowing he was part of the wind. Come, Max! Come to the water and see! No one could tell that he was crying—he was running too fast.
“Max!”
Stupid Gary was following him, trying to run, huffing mightily. Max ran faster, almost flying, his hands grabbing at the air. When he looked over his shoulder again, he saw that Gary was losing ground. A moment later, the freckled little man pulled up lame—he was doubled over, holding his leg. Max kept running, and though his face was wet with tears, he grinned maniacally. He had won. He ran to the cul-de-sac, where the road ended and the trees began.
Max was free of home and mother and Gary and Claire; he had outwitted and outrun them all, but he was not ready to rest. He ran to the lean-to he’d built in the woods by the bay, and sat inside for a few seconds, but he was too alive to sit still. He got up and howled. Something about the wind and the configuration of the trees and outcroppings gave his voice more volume; his howl twisted and multiplied in the sky in the most satisfying way. He grabbed the biggest stick he could find and commenced hitting everything he could with it. He swung it around, he stabbed trees and rocks, he whacked branches and relieved them of their snowy burden.
This, he thought, was the only way he wanted to live. All he needed to do, sometime soon, was sneak back into the house and get some of his things—his knives, blankets and glue and rope, maybe some of his mom’s matches. Then he would build a forest home, high in the trees, and become one with the woods and the animals, learn their languages and with them plot an overthrow of his home, beginning with the decapitation and devouring of Gary.
As he planned his new life, he heard a sound. It wasn’t the wind and it wasn’t the trees. It was a scraping, yearning sound. He paused, his nose twitching and his ears pricking up. It was like bone against bone, though there was a rhythm to it. He followed it toward the water, a hundred yards away. He jogged down the ravine and met the stream that led to the shore. He jumped from rock to rock until he saw the bay’s black glass, cut through the middle by the reflection of the moon.
At the water’s edge, amid the reeds and the softly lapping waves, he saw the source of the noise: a wooden sailboat of average size and painted white. It was tied to a tree and was rubbing against a half-submerged rock.
Max looked around to see if anyone was close. It seemed strange that a boat like this, a sturdy, viable boat, would be unoccupied. He had been coming to the bay for years and had never seen a boat like this, alone and without an owner. There was no sign of anyone nearby. The boat was his if he wanted it.
He stepped in. There was just a bit of water on the bottom, and when he checked the rudder and sail and boom everything seemed to be in working order.
If he wanted to, he could untie the boat and sail out into the bay. It would be even better than living out his days in the forest. He could sail away, as far as he liked. He might make it somewhere new, somewhere better, and if he didn’t—if he drowned in the bay or the ocean beyond—then so be it. His horrible family would have to live forever with the guilt. Either option seemed good.
Max untied the boat from the tree, and pushed off. He righted the boat and aimed it toward the center of the bay. He unfurled the sail and steadied the boom. The wind was strong; in no time he was chopping through the bay’s small waves.
He had sailed at night only once before, with his father, and even that had been unplanned. They’d gotten stuck out in the bay without wind, and hadn’t brought a paddle. They’d passed the time naming every candy they could remember and playing hangman with a grease marker on the boat’s floor. It occurred to Max that he didn’t have any of the safety items his father insisted on—a life preserver, a paddle, a flare gun, a bailing vessel. The boat was empty but for Max.
And he was getting cold. By the time he reached the middle of the bay and the wind began to bite, he realized that it was December, and no more than forty degrees, and the farther out into the bay he ventured the colder it would get. When he’d been running and howling, he hadn’t felt the rip of the winter wind, but now it cut through his fur—and his T-shirt and underwear—unimpeded.
He decided to sail not into the ocean but toward the city, where his father lived. This immediately seemed a better idea. He would sail downtown, dock with all the yachts, walk through the city until he found his father’s apartment, and ring the bell.
Wow, he’d be surprised! He would be astounded and impressed, and they would live together from then on. All Max needed to do was sail north for a few hours and keep his eye on the dim glow of the city in the distance.
But the city seemed to be getting farther away, not closer. Max held the rudder steady, and the sail had a constant bellyful of wind, but as the hours passed the city grew smaller. According to the compass screwed onto the bow, Max was sailing directly for it, due north-northwest, and yet the city lights were growing fainter.
There was little Max could do. He knew he was sailing straight. He hoped that sometime in the night the bay would become rational again and the city would draw closer. He would have to tell his father about this strange elastic stretching of the bay! But soon the city was disappearing altogether. For a while, it was no more than a twinkle of dwindling lights, and shortly thereafter it was gone. There was no sign of land in any direction. Max didn’t want to admit it to himself, but some part of him acknowledged that in all likelihood he’d left the bay and was now in the open sea.
Before Max was even tired, the moon had fallen through the water and the sun had risen to replace it. He’d sailed all night without sleep and was too bewildered to think about rest now. He continued sailing north-northwest, but even though it was daylight, he saw nothing. Not a fish, not a bird. The wind had slackened, and the sea grew broader and more interminable. By his rough calculations, he had to be at least seven million miles from where he cast off.
As the sun climbed higher, he was tired enough to sleep. He pulled in the sail, tied it to the mast, rigged the rudder so it would remain true, and fell asleep.
When he woke, it was already the next morning, the beginning of the longest day Max had ever known. In his boat, the straight line of ocean unbroken on any side, every minute was a day, one hour was longer than any life ever lived.
His mind ran out of things to think about. He thought of everything he’d ever thought of by midday and then could only start over. He named all of his classmates, dividing them into the ones he knew, the ones he tolerated, the ones he barely knew, and the ones he would punch in the head if he had the chance. He named all of his uncles and aunts. Uncles Stuart, Grant, Scotty, Wash, and Jeff; Aunts Isabelle, Paulina, Lucy, Juliet. Who was that last one, the one who played rugby? Theresa.
Max sailed in and out of days and nights. He endured blustery winds, cruel winds, chattering winds, and warm blanketing breezes. There were waves like dragons and waves like sparrows. There were occasional sightings of birds and fish and flies, but nothing that Max could reach or much less eat. There was rain, but mostly there was sun, the terribly unimaginative sun, doing the same things day in and day out. He loosened a nail on the boat’s bench and removed it. He used it to count the hours (as close as he could approximate) as they passed, marking them on the bench as a prisoner would. On the outer rim of the boat, he carved his name as big as he could so that any fish or whales or passing ships would know who commanded this vessel: “MAX,” it said.
T hen one day he saw something. A green blot on the horizon, no bigger than a caterpillar. Not trusting his eyes, he thought little of it. He went to sleep again.
When he awoke, the caterpillar had become an island. It towered over him—massive cliffs, green hills above.
By the time he reached the shore, it was night and the island had gone black. It was a good deal less welcoming now, as a silhouette against a gunmetal sky, but there was something high in the hills that beckoned him: an orange glow between the trees.
Max jumped into the water. He’d thought it would be at most waist-deep, but it was far deeper than that. His feet could not reach the bottom and he was quickly swallowed in the foam, the white. And the cold! The water was colder than he thought possible; it knocked the wind out of him.
He held the rope that held the boat, and tried to dog-paddle shoreward. He thought for a moment that he would have to let go of the rope, lest he drown. But just as his head dropped below the surface, and the boat tugged against his grip, his feet found the sand, and he stood.
Max dragged the boat onto the beach, placed a group of large stones around it, and tied its lead to the biggest tree he could find. He was tired and hungry and leaden; the weight of his fur when wet surprised him. He considered taking off his wolf suit, but he knew if he did he’d be even colder. The wind was bracing, and he knew that his only chance at warmth—and survival—would be to climb the cliffs and find his way to the fire he’d seen from the sea.
So this is what he did.
The cliffs were jagged but dependable. He climbed to the top in under an hour and rested at the summit. Looking back at the boat—he was easily two hundred feet up—he heard sounds coming from the island’s interior: crunching and crashing, whooping and howling, the crackle of a gigantic fire. Only in his depleted and desperate state would Max have considered that his best option would be to run, stumble, and crawl through the densest and wildest kind of jungle toward the sounds of what seemed to be some kind of riot.
But this is what he did.
He walked for hours in the moonlight. He slashed his way through the undergrowth, ducking under grasping, luminescent ferns and slithering between barbed and crosshatched vines. He waded through narrow creeks and climbed over boulders covered with a red and delicate moss that clung to the stone like embroidery. The landscape was familiar—there were trees, there was dirt, there were rocks—but then very odd: the earth seemed to be striped in brown and yellow, like peanut butter and cinnamon at the first twirl of a mixing spoon. After some time, his fur, at least above his shins, was dry, and he was warmer, but he was so tired he was dreaming on his feet. Again and again, he would shudder awake and find that he’d been walking while asleep, always making his way toward the chaos in the center of the island.
Finally, when he reached the top of a long high hill, he saw the fire, huge and snapping at the black sky. Most of it was obscured by a giant boulder in his line of vision, but the fire’s size was clear: it licked the surrounding trees orange and blotted out the stars above. It was intentional. It had a center and a purpose.
Then, movement. First, there was just a blur—some kind of creature shooting through the trees, a rushing shape silhouetted by the red fire beyond. It could have been a horse, he thought, but the animal seemed to be running upright, on two feet.
Max dropped to his knees, holding his breath.
Another shape darted between the trees. This one was the same size, but Max could have sworn he’d seen a beak. It seemed to Max’s tired eyes that a giant rooster, twelve feet tall, had just run across his field of vision.
Max had half a mind to turn and flee—for what good could come of engaging beasts of that size near a fire of that strength?—but he couldn’t leave just yet. The heat from the blaze had awakened him, and he had to know what was happening down there.
So he skulked forward. He wanted the warmth the fire promised, and he wanted whatever food might have been roasted on it, and he wanted more than anything else to find out just what was going on.
A hundred yards more and he knew.
Sort of. That is, he saw what he saw but couldn’t believe any of it. He saw animals. Animals? Creatures of some kind. Huge and fast. He thought they might be oversized sorts of humans covered in fur, but they were bigger than that, hairier than that. They were ten or twelve feet tall, each four hundred pounds or more. Max knew his animal kingdom, but he had no name for these beasts. From behind, they resembled bears, but they were larger than bears, their heads far bigger. Even so, their movements were nimble, deft—they had the quickness of deer or small monkeys. And they all looked different, as humans do: one had a long broken horn on its nose; another had a wide flat face, stringy hair, and pleading eyes; another seemed like a cross between a boy and a goat. And another—
It had been a giant rooster. This was the weirdest one by far. Max slapped himself, making sure he was awake. He was awake, and there was a giant rooster before him, no more than twenty yards away in the full glow of the raging fire. It was at once comical—it looked like a giant man in a rooster suit—and powerful and menacing.
The rooster seemed frustrated, staring at another creature, of similar height and heft but with a different shape. This one had a mop of reddish hair and a leonine face, with a large horn, like a rhino’s, extending from its nose. It looked female, if that was possible for such an ugly thing. She was in the middle of beating a large nest, resting on the ground, with a log.
And this seemed to be greatly upsetting the rooster.
Soon, Max could see a pattern to what the beasts were doing. It looked as if they’d come upon some kind of settlement, full of great round nests—each made of huge sticks and logs, and bigger than a car—and had decided to destroy them. They were systematically wrecking them all, like kids destroying sandcastles.
Max was about to turn and run the other way when he heard (could it be?) a word. There was, he was almost sure, a word: “Go!”
And just as he was repeating the sound in his mind, turning it over, analyzing it, the creature closest to him spoke a full sentence: “Is it twisted?”
Two of the creatures appeared to have fallen through the wall of a nest, and one was asking the other for help, assessing possible injuries to its spine.
“Yeah, it’s kind of twisted,” the other said.
Then the two gathered themselves up and ran off.
Max squatted down again, determined now to watch a bit longer, to try to figure out what was happening and why.
One creature seemed to be leading the melee. He had a big round face, sharp horns like a Viking’s, and dark bags under his eyes. He was getting ready to run toward one of the nests when the rooster approached him and put his hand—it wasn’t a wing; he seemed to have hands and claws—on his shoulder.
“Carol, can I speak to you for a second?”
“Not now, Douglas,” the big one, Carol, said, and moved the rooster aside. Then Carol got a running start and barrelled into the nest, knocking it flat.
Max was astounded. Had that sentence just been uttered? These weren’t grunting monsters. They spoke just like people. Gradually, Max realized that they were a kind of family.
Douglas, the rooster, seemed logical and even-tempered, and didn’t appreciate the way that Carol was trying to amuse himself. Carol was the main instigator and the heartiest of the destroyers. He was the biggest, the strongest, the loudest. He had horizontal stripes on his torso like a kind of sweater, and his claws were huge and cleaver-sharp.
The creature with the horn and the red mop of hair was called Judith, and she had a sharp, poky voice and a harsh cackle for a laugh. Ira had a bulbous nose, and he seemed to be always close to Judith. Max guessed they might even be a couple. Ira had a sad sort of aura and poor posture. There was the goat-shaped one, Alexander, with a snarl for a face and pin-thin legs. He was just a little bigger than Max. And then there was a bull, whose name seemed to be the Bull. He was gigantic, maybe thirteen feet high, and seemed built entirely of muscle and stone. He hadn’t said a word yet.
The beasts jumped from trees into the nests, they tossed each other into piles, they rolled boulders into the remains of the structures. It was just about the best mayhem Max had ever seen.
But soon there was a lull in the action. One by one, the beasts sat down, scratching themselves and nursing small wounds.
“I’m bored,” one said.
“Me, too,” said another.
“C’mon!” Carol roared. “Let’s finish this!”
There was no answer from the rest of them. Ira sat down. Carol jogged over to him—they really were agile things, these creatures, Max thought.
“Ira,” Carol said, “we’re not done yet. The job isn’t complete.”
“But I’m so tired!” Ira said. “And uninspired.”
“Hey, don’t think you can rhyme your way out of this. Uninspired? How’s that possible?” Carol turned to address the rest of the creatures. “C’mon, isn’t this fun? Who’s gonna really go crazy with me?”
No one responded. Carol jumped from beast to beast, trying to create some excitement. When he approached the rooster, Douglas said, “Carol, why are we doing this in the first place?”
A quick cloud came over Carol’s face. His teeth—what must have been a hundred of them, each as big as Max’s hand—were bared in something between a smile and a show of force. He ignored Douglas. “All I need to know now is if there’s anyone on this island who’s brave and creative and wild enough to help finish this job. Is there anyone up to it?”
No one responded.
“Anyone?”
Something clicked in Max. His thoughts lined up, his plan was orderly and clear: he needed to be that someone.
Max dashed down the hill and between the legs of Douglas and Ira, his face a knot of determination. The creatures towered over him, and outweighed him by thousands of pounds.
“Whoa, what’s that?” Ira said, alarmed.
“Look at his little legs!” Judith squealed.
“What’s he doing?” Douglas asked.
Max intended to show them. He took the largest stick he could swing and he began to hit everything he saw. He knocked over the remains of whatever nests still stood, he broke low-hanging branches from the trees, he screamed and howled.
The beasts cheered.
“See, that thing knows how to wreck stuff!” Carol said, his eyes aglow. “Let’s do one together, little thing.”
Together, Carol and Max picked up a long log and ran at a nest that had survived intact, laying waste to it. Max had never destroyed so much so well and so quickly. He followed Carol to one of the last nests, and he and Carol both lifted their sticks over their heads, preparing to crush it with simultaneous blows.
“Hey, new guy!” Judith snapped. “Don’t touch that one.”
Max hesitated.
“Don’t lay a finger on it,” she warned.
With a laugh, Carol kicked his immense foot into the structure, reducing it to splinters. “There,” he said. “Not a finger.”
Max had to laugh. That was pretty good. He watched as Carol, his comrade-in-arms, ran over to the other side of the clearing, looking for anything left standing.
Max looked, too. But as far as he could see there was nothing left to destroy. Max stood in the middle of a desolate plain. The nests were no more. He started to walk toward Carol, to celebrate the completeness of their wreckage, when Douglas appeared in front of Max, blocking his path.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What? I’m just helping,” Max said.
“Then why are you smashing our houses?”
“These are your houses?” This was news to Max. He’d assumed they were destroying some enemy encampment. “Why are you smashing them?”
“I’m not, actually. You’re not very observant for someone swinging that big stick around.”
Max dropped the stick.
“Wait,” Alexander said, standing in the ruins, alone and teary-eyed, like a child lost at the mall. “Where will we sleep tonight?”
Suddenly, a realization seemed to spread among the beasts.
“I was trying to tell you all that,” Douglas said.
“Well, don’t blame me,” Judith said.
“Why not?” Douglas said. “You were wrecking as much as anyone else. You wrecked everything but your own nest.”
“Sure, but I didn’t enjoy it,” she said. “And, anyway, it wasn’t my fault.”
Douglas was shaking his head. “Then whose fault was it?”
Judith looked around for a moment, and her eyes settled, rather happily, on Max.
“The new guy!” she said. “He’s the one who got everyone riled up. And you know what I say you do with a problem? Eat it.”
“Yeah,” Alexander said. “He’s the problem!”
“What are you guys doing?” Ira asked.
“Oh, we were just gonna eat that,” Judith said, pointing to Max, as if picking out a lobster at a restaurant.
“O.K.,” Ira said, shrugging and beginning to drool.
Max was very quickly surrounded by the three of them, and soon Douglas and the Bull had joined the throng, and the air was very dark and warm with beast sweat. Max backed up until he found himself against a mess of sticks and mud where a home used to be. There was no escape.
“He’s an ugly bugger, though, isn’t he?” Judith said.
“Close your eyes, then. I’ll feed him to you,” Ira said.
“Oh, that’s so romantic!” she said.
“Hold on!” a voice yelled from across the camp. It was Carol. Max felt some relief, and yet the creatures were still closing in on him. Max could feel their hot wet breath on his face, he could see their enormous teeth, each incisor as big as his foot. Ira licked his lips. The Bull snorted, his hands reaching toward Max.
Max knew Carol couldn’t save him in time. He had to save himself—somehow. He arched his back, and, with a voice that emerged far louder and more commanding than he had expected, he roared, “Be still!”
The beasts stopped. They stopped moving, stopped talking, stopped raising their arms to claw Max to death, stopped salivating. Max couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know what to do next.
“Why?” Judith said. “Why should we stop?”
This was a tricky question, Max knew. If he was about to bite into, say, a strawberry, and it told him to stop, he, too, would want a good explanation.
“Because . . . uh . . . because . . . ,” he mumbled.
The beasts stared, waiting, blowing roughly through their nostrils. Max knew he had to come up with something immediately, and, to his surprise, he did. “Because,” he said, “I heard about this one time that they weren’t still, and they . . .”
“Who?” Judith said. “Who wasn’t still?”
By this time Carol had arrived, standing behind the others.
“Um . . . the hammers,” Max explained, making it up as he went along. “They were huge ones and they didn’t know how to be still. They were crazy. They were always shaking and running around and they never stopped to see what was right in front of them. So this one time the hammers were storming down the mountainside and they couldn’t even see that someone was coming up to help them. And you know what happened?”
The beasts, enthralled, shook their heads.
“They ran right over him and killed him,” Max said.
There were a few gasps, but there were also a few sounds that said, “Well, what else would they do?”
“And the thing is,” Max added, “he liked them. He was there to help.”
“Who was he?” Douglas asked.
“Who was who?” Max said.
“The guy coming up the hill,” Douglas said.
“He was . . .” And again Max fumbled in the velvet darkness of his mind and found, impossibly, a gem. “He was their king.”
Carol stepped forward. “Do you like us?”
This was a tough question. Max wasn’t sure that he liked any of them, given that they had been, moments earlier, about to devour his flesh and brains. But in the interest of self-preservation, and because he had liked them a lot when they were all breaking things, he said, “Yeah. I like you.”
Ira cleared his throat and said, with a hope-filled catch in his voice, “Are you our king?”
Max had rarely had to do so much bluffing in his life. “Sure. Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”
A ripple of excitement spread through the beasts.
“Wow, he’s the king,” Ira said.
Douglas stepped forward, as if he’d just thought of a stumper of a question that might decide it all: “Were you king where you came from?”
Max was getting good at the fibbing, so this one was easy. “Yeah, I was,” he said. “King Max. For twenty years.”
A quick happy murmur rose from the creatures.
“Are you going to make this a better place?” Ira asked.
“Sure,” Max said.
“Because it’s screwed up, let me tell you,” Judith blurted.
“Quiet, Judith,” Carol said.
“Judith, of course he’s here to fix everything,” Douglas said. “Why else would a king be a king, and a king be here?” He turned to Max. “Right, King?”
“Uh, sure,” Max said.
Carol smiled. “Well, that settles it, then. He’s our king!”
They all moved in to hug Max.
“Sorry we were gonna eat you,” Douglas said.
“We didn’t know you were the king,” Ira said.
“If we’d known you were the king, we almost definitely wouldn’t have tried to eat you,” Judith added, then laughed in a sudden, mirthless trill. She lowered her voice to a confessional tone. “We just got caught up in the moment.”
Max was swept up and lifted high in the air and finally set down on the shoulders of the Bull. The Bull followed Carol into a cave under an enormous tree. Inside the cave, two torches illuminated a golden oval of a room.
The Bull put Max down and rooted around in a pile of rubble on the floor. He soon retrieved a sceptre, copper-colored and bejewelled, and gave it to Max. Max inspected it reverently. It was heavy, but not too heavy, with a hand-carved handle and a crystal orb at the top.
The Bull continued to dig through the rubble. Curious, Max peered around the Bull and saw that it wasn’t a pile of sticks and rocks but a pile of what looked to be bones. They were yellowed and broken, the remains of maybe a dozen different creatures—twisted and spotted skulls and ribs in sizes and shapes Max had never seen in any book or museum.
“Aha!” Carol bellowed. “There it is.”
Max looked up to see that the Bull had pulled a crown from the heap. It was golden, rough-hewn, and as the Bull turned to place the crown on Max’s head Max pulled away.
“Wait,” he said, pointing to the pile of bones. “Are those . . . other kings?”
The Bull glanced quickly at Carol with a look of mild concern.
“No, no!” Carol said, chuckling. “Those were there before we got here. We’ve never even seen them before.”
Then Carol and the Bull did a quick jig atop the bones, reducing them to dust.
“See?” Carol said, grinning, his eyes nervous and alight. “Nothing to worry about. Just dust. You’re the king. And nothing bad can happen to the king.”
Max looked into Carol’s eyes, each of them as big as a volleyball. They were the warmest brown and green.
“But what do I have to do?” Max asked.
“Do? Anything you want to do,” Carol said.
“And what do you have to do?”
“Anything you want us to do,” Carol said. He answered so quickly that Max was convinced.
“Then, O.K.,” Max said.
He lowered his head to receive his crown. Carol gently placed it on Max’s head. It was heavy, and the metal was cool on his forehead. But the crown fit, and Max smiled. Carol stood back and looked at him, nodding as if everything had finally fallen into place.
The Bull lifted Max and placed him back on his shoulders, and they made their way out of the cave to deafening cheers from the rest of the beasts. The Bull paraded Max around the forest as everyone whooped and danced in a very ugly—drool and mucus spraying left and right—but celebratory kind of way. After a few minutes, the Bull placed Max atop a grassy knoll, and the beasts gathered around, looking up at him expectantly. Max understood that he was supposed to say something, so he said the only thing he could think of:
This week’s story, “Max at Sea,” is taken from your forthcoming novel, “The Wild Things.” The book is loosely based on the screenplay you and Spike Jonze wrote for the film “Where the Wild Things Are,” which, of course, is based on the book by Maurice Sendak. How soon after the screenplay was completed did you start working on the novel?
I started working on the book a few years after we began the screenplay. The script was pretty much done, and when the movie was about to begin filming, Maurice called me. He said there’d been some talk about doing a novelization of the movie, and he asked if I’d be the one to do it. I said yes, mainly because Maurice asked, and also because I love it when there are different permutations of the same story. I just read the unabridged version of Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” and it’s amazing how little of the book made it into the movie. They’re both great in their way, of course—the screenplay for “The Wizard of Oz” is something Spike and I studied a lot; it’s so incredibly good—but in a book, you just have so much more room to stretch out. So I thought it would be fun to do an all-ages expansion on the screenplay. And after a few years of working on the script with Spike, we had a lot of pages and ideas that wouldn’t fit into the actual movie; a script is about ninety pages, and even then, they’re ninety pretty sparse pages. So I went into the novelization thinking it would be a place to put all these passages and scenes that wouldn’t fit into the movie. And I did end up using a few of those scenes. But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version. Of course, a lot of people won’t see significant differences between the two—the movie and novel do conform to the same general arc, and the characters are largely the same. But there are some expansions and departures. And the great thing is that in a book, you don’t have to figure out how you’ll actually get something done in the real world. I can write about one of the Wild Things jumping fifty feet in the air, and I don’t have to worry about how a dozen technicians in the Australian wilderness are going to accomplish that. That was Spike’s job.
What was it like to take a book as beloved as “Where the Wild Things Are” and start expanding on it? Did you ever feel constrained by the idea of fidelity to the original book? Or to the screenplay?
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there’s less pressure to figure all that out. So it was a matter of probing deeper into who Max is, what he wants, what his life is like at home and at school. And on the island, looking deeper into who the Wild Things are and what they want from Max, his life as their king, and why he leaves. From the beginning, though, Maurice was clear that he didn’t want the movie or the book to be timid adaptations. He wanted us to feel free to push and pull the original story in new directions. Spike also gave me total leeway to make the book my own. He didn’t change a word, even though there were some things he was surprised by. That’s why we say the book is “loosely” or “very loosely” based on the movie.
Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” will be released on October 16th. Have you seen the final version? As you were working on the script with Spike Jonze and then writing the novel, did you have any idea what the story would look like on the screen.
From the beginning, I knew Spike was doing a naturalistic, live-action version of the book. He had a sense of all that at the very beginning, and it immediately seemed like the right choice, but difficult. He knew he wanted real trees, real dirt, and that Max would sail in a real boat on a real ocean. So from the start there was a clear sense that the look would be the sort of human, naturalistic cinematography that he’s used in all his movies. I haven’t seen the final-final version yet—the version where the effects have been added and the music is all in place. I think I’m seeing it next week. But I’ve seen enough over the years to know that Spike absolutely achieved what he set out to do, which was to make an honest and beautiful film about childhood. I always knew he would, because he’s uniquely suited to make a movie about a boy, given he’s still got a lot of boy in him. He skateboards, and I’ve seen him wrestle dogs. The last time I was at his house, he shot me with a BB gun.
You recently published a non-fiction book, “Zeitoun,” which is based on the experiences of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-born resident of New Orleans who stayed in the city during Hurricane Katrina to look after his contracting business. How did you first come across Zeitoun, and why did you decide you wanted to tell his story?
Abdulrahman was one of the narrators in “Voices from the Storm,” a book of New Orleans oral histories we published through the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series. When I read it, it just seemed so impossible that the Bush-era anti-terror priorities had somehow trickled down to the handling of Katrina. But FEMA had been folded into Homeland Security at that point, so in a way the overwhelmingly militarized response to this humanitarian crisis was likely. Abdulrahman was picked up by soldiers in a home he owned, handcuffed, and thrown in a makeshift, Guantánamo-like outdoor prison that had been erected in New Orleans hours after the storm hit. His experiences seemed very much a manifestation of that moment in time during the Bush years, when the answer to any question was a military one, undergirded by a certain pervasive paranoia that terror and terrorists were everywhere, even roaming a flooded city in a canoe. But separately I thought the Zeitoun family was such a wonderful one, and the first time we did an afternoon of interviews, I just felt that the family was part of the story, too. There was such warmth and joy in the house—the kids were all over the place, dancing and singing and playing with the chickens (they had chickens at the time; now they have ducks). It’s hard to explain, but they’re so good to be around, Abdulrahman and Kathy and their kids, that introducing this all-American family turned into a secondary purpose in writing the book. Everyone who knows the Zeitouns cares so deeply about them, and that makes it all the more outrageous and infuriating when we know what happened to them after Katrina.
Your 2006 novel, “What is the What,” about the civil war in southern Sudan, also draws on the biography of a real person, Valentino Achak Deng, who you interviewed many times when you were working on the book. You use a first-person narrator and clearly identify “What is the What” as a work of fiction. How did you make the decision to tell Deng’s story in this way? Did you ever think about repeating this approach in “Zeitoun”?
Valentino and I decided “What Is the What” had to be fiction, because we wanted the book to have the sweep and detail and emotional engagement of a novel, and the only way to achieve that was to be able to describe days and scenes vividly, to use all the novelist’s tools. And of course, given so much of the book takes place when Valentino is a boy, we just couldn’t prove certain events happened on certain days, or that a town was attacked in a certain year. The historical records just aren’t there, so calling it nonfiction wasn’t possible. With Zeitoun, the events depicted in the book are so recent, and so well-documented, that approaching it as nonfiction was possible, and necessary. The story of the Zeitoun family, and of what happened to Abdulrahman, is so bizarre that no one would believe it in fiction. We decided that it was best to just tell the story straight.
In “What is the What,” a boy loses his home and his family in the space of an afternoon. In “Zeitoun,” a city floods and a man seemingly vanishes for three weeks. These were real and awful events, of course, but I wondered whether the almost unreal, fantastical nature of them influenced you at all while you were working on “The Wild Things.”
Most of “The Wild Things” was written back in 2005, before I started on “Zeitoun,” but I will say that there were a few weeks this past year when I was revising “The Wild Things” and working on “Zeitoun” around the same time, and that was an odd experience. Both books involve a boy or a man alone on the water, while their families aren’t sure where they are or even if they’re alive.
“The Wild Things” will come in a fur edition, I hear?
It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur. I told Maurice about it, and he told me a story of someone trying the same thing, with real fur, back in the sixties. I guess they made thousands of them, wrapped in some kind of real fur, and sent them to a warehouse for a while before shipping them to stores. By the time they came to ship the books, the warehouse was full of moths, and most of the fur had been eaten. Anyway, we went to a printer in Singapore about this, and they sent us a bunch of faux-fur samples. We chose one that’s usually used to repair small holes in mink coats. I think we ordered more of this fur than had ever been ordered at one time. The result looks pretty good, though. Very creepy.
