Booky Ooky!

The Neddiad : How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization / Daniel Pinkwater
Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - 0618594442

I’ll make the summary brief. The Neddiad is the lastest novel by Daniel Pinkwater, who everyone seems to know about except me. It’s being serialized at the author’s website at the rate of one short chapter a week. At 79 chapters, I’m going to suggest this is not the best way to read this book.

The plot is, in short, thus: Neddie and his family live in Chicago with 12 parakeets. Their father’s weird. They move to L.A. to eat in a stucco restaurant shaped like a hat, and on the way, Neddie is given a little stone turtle that will save the world from some terrifying demon god. He meets a ton of kooky characters in his adventure including a shaman who can be everywhere at once, the ghost of a bellhop, an old Western star, and a bitchy girl in a dress that is a direct reincarnation of Lloyd Alexander’s (R.I.P.) Eilonwy. The plot itself is not particularly compelling, and consists of a ton of awkwardly-short chapters (Da Vinci Code, anyone?) with no real urgency.

What is fun about this book is the way Pinkwater paints such an off-the-wall picture of the American southwest. This is a world filled with travelling circuses, buildings shaped like doughnuts, taxidermy/curio shops (Stuffed Stuff ‘n Stuff), and a cast of characters so caricatured it was like they walked off the pages of a Lemony Snicket book. It’s a lot of fun to read, and with the unique, child-like voice he gives to Neddie, probably a fun read-aloud (as Neil Gaiman’s blurb on the back suggests, which, incidentally, was a huge selling point.)

Still, something irritated me about this book, and I wasn’t sure what it was, though I knew it had to do with a couple of scenes in the middle and the “final battle,” as it were, between Neddie and the ultimate evil. In the middle of the book, there were a couple of scenes in which, all alone at night, Neddie would run into this huge turtle in a swimming pool and have these spiritual experiences. Observe:

I wasn’t scared for a second. Just the opposite–I felt this tremendous… warmth. No, not warmth… joy. Oh, it was more than joy. It was… just the biggest kind of love. Love. This gigantic turtle, as big as a car, and so impossibly old, and I was brimming over with love for it.

Yeah. He would see this turtle and burst into tears like some sort of… well, I don’t want to offend anyone. Anyway, this stands out even more when you consider the rest of the book is written in this charming, childish way and then suddenly there’s this weird religious experience. Sounds like a bunch of hippie crap to me. The final battle was similar, but I’ll not spoil the ending, uneventful as it was.

It made me think Pinkwater was trying to accomplish something deeper here. Despite the light-hearted, off-the-cuff kookiness (such a fun word) of most of the book, these few chapters hinted at something that never arrived. It was like a weak fish with one fin trying like mad to come to the surface of a stormy ocean with some spectacular greater meaning between it’s fishy lips, but I think the giant turtle ate him. To further support my theory, another quote, this time from an Amazon.com review by Pinkwater himself about his own book:

I have read all the reviews of this book so far. Most of the reviewers liked it pretty well. Did any of them actually get what it’s about? Not really. Do I know what it’s about? Well, I’m the author. Am I going to say what it’s about? Nope–that would be telling. I hope you will read it, and make up your own mind. If you hate the book, you can always make it a present to someone whose taste you don’t respect, or use it for pressing flowers, or a doorstop.

First of all, reviewing your own book on Amazon.com is usually bad form, but it’s not like he’s whining here about people hating his book like some other authors have done, so he gets a pass. His note is actually rather charming.

But ok. If nobody “gets” what your book is about, then your book is not about anything. Meaning does not exist because you say it does. We are not Humpty Dumpty. We are regular people, and if everybody is interpreting your book improperly, then you’ve failed. Not failed as an author. Not failed to write an entertaining book. Just failed to do what you think you did. It’s fine! Really, don’t get upset about it, Mr. Pinkwater. It’s just a bit sad that those turtle scenes–as I am convinced it is those scenes that carry whatever meaning you had in mind, though like everyone else, I am probably wrong too–didn’t work and made the book fall a bit flat.

So while it’s not relegated to jam my door, The Neddiad failed to take my breath away. It’s cute, it’s clever, and it starts out really well, but without the urgency of a real crisis or plot, the second half plods sort of pointlessly. Kinda like a turtle.

More info:

• The Neddiad homepage at Daniel Pinkwater’s site
• Daniel Pinkwater on Wikipedia

Other reviews:

• Outside a Cat
• No, you only get one this time.