1939: THIMBLE SUMMER by Elizabeth Enright
Garnet thought this must be the hottest day that had ever been in the world.
1939 medalist Thimble Summer, a collection of vignettes about a Wisconsin farm girl who eventually enters her pig in the state fair, is mostly forgettable but includes one story in its second chapter that sticks with me. Garnet, the farm girl, goes over to the home of her friend Citronella to hear a story from Citronella’s great-grandmother, because back in those days people didn’t have television or baby name books. The great-grandmother tells a story about her tenth birthday, when all she wanted was a coral bracelet that she had seen at the general store. She saves up her money to buy the bracelet over the course of weeks, and secures a promise from her dad that he will drive her into town to purchase the bracelet on her birthday. But circumstances force the father to break that promise, the young great-grandmother runs away to town to purchase the bracelet - which isn’t even there, the shopkeeper sold it weeks ago - and then gets lost on her way back and is supposed to be taking care of her brother anyways, so the whole thing ends up being a mess because this young girl was just obsessed with getting this one gift for herself.
The reason this story sticks with me is because I remember, specifically, being obsessed like this when I was a middle school reader, with a gift I really wanted to get for my birthday, which happened to be a book that was very formative for me in my middle and high school years. I was such an insufferable little prick about it that my parents agreed to order me a copy of the book early from this website called Amazon Dot Com, which was a place on the internet where you could order books. This was in 2000. You could actually get the third Harry Potter book on that website before it came out in the US, if you went to the British version of the Internet, where Amazon Dot Com was called Amazon Dot Co Dot UK.
Anyways, as often happens with things you try and get shipped to your home, the package got delayed, and seventh-grade me started losing his mind. How did it keep getting delayed?!? Eventually, my mom, possibly because she loved me and possibly just to get me to shut the hell up and read instead of asking her to track the shipment again (and most likely for both reasons), drove into downtown Chicago, to the shipper’s distribution center, to pick up my book for me.
As I said, this book happened to be formative for me in my middle and high school years; I have a lot of those books still on my bookshelf today and I still revisit them regularly. I don’t revisit this one anymore. I’d like to explain why, but first, I should tell you what the book was. It was this:
I should clarify, the book wasn’t just a paperback of Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it was the full one-volume set of Adams’ Hitchhiker “trilogy”, which is actually five novels and looks like this:
I loved Douglas Adams. Twelve-year-old Tony would follow his parents and his friends around and read the wittiest quotes from Hitchhiker constantly. I would doodle full verbatim dialogue exchanges between Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox in the inside covers of his school notebooks, where other people would presumably doodle hearts or the Nine Inch Nails logo. My term paper in high school British Lit was on Douglas Adams (my term paper in American Lit was on Madeleine L’Engle). This is in space? And it’s funny?? But not funny in a slapstick way, funny in this extremely dry British way that smart seventh-graders appreciate especially??? When you are twelve years old and you watch syndicated reruns of Star Trek with your parents and spend a lot of your spare time in the library, Hitchhiker opens up an entire new world for you, not just with the goofy-but-fascinating capital-U Universe that Adams built across his five novels, but with a new vocabulary of witty repartee and comebacks and deliberate interruptions of genre conventions, coupled with some memorable turns of phrase1 and a few extremely prescient creations of alien technology, that could all change the way that a twelve year old interacted with everyone he knew.
The problem, of course, is that if you are older than twelve, Hitchhiker is not the greatest novel of all time, and is in fact kind of grating. If you aren’t familiar with the story, here’s some quick context: at the very beginning of the first novel, aliens destroy Earth in order to make way for an interstellar bypass. All of humanity is destroyed, except one perpetually beleaguered Englishman named Arthur Dent; Dent’s best friend, unbeknownst to him, is an alien reporter camped out on Earth to submit pieces for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a giant intergalactic online resource that is basically what Wikipedia is now in real life, and is able to get Dent off of the planet and onto interplanetary adventures with his friends. Throughout all five Hitchhiker novels, Adams frequently interjects as the narrator with wry commentary, and also includes “excerpts” from the fictional “Guide”. One of the most illustrative passages of Adams’ style from the first novel is found in his description of the Babel Fish, an alien fish that can serve as a universal translating tool when placed in another sentient being’s ear canal. This is an extremely cool piece of alien technology that Adams invented decades before Google Translate - today, there is still a Google-Translate-like free service called Babel Fish which predates Translate and is named after Adams’ writing - and here’s the last piece of the fish’s description, taken from the “Guide”2:
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chose to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? I could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own argument, you don’t. QED.
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
When you’re twelve, that’s pure comedic brilliance. As an adult, you see that it’s clever, but there’s not that much beneath the cleverness. Ha ha, God has been trapped in his own logic, that sort of thing. Elon Musk has called Douglas Adams his favorite philosopher, which serves as additional reinforcement that he’s a moron with no meaningful value system; a person who was actually morally mature would have named Terry Pratchett instead (or, I suppose, an actual philosopher, but Terry Pratchett would still be a very good pick). Hitchhiker isn’t a work of philosophy, it’s a work of comedy, and often pedantic comedy at that. At one point, Arthur and his friend Ford try to escape from an alien captor by flattering him and saying his (terrible) poetry was actually very good.
“‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective.’
Ford continued to stare at him, slowly organizing his thoughts around this totally new concept. Were they really going to be able to bareface their way out of this?...
‘Oh…and, er…interesting rhythmic devices too,’ continued Arthur, ‘which seemed to counterpoint the…er…er…’ he floundered.
Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding ‘...counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the…er…’ He floundered too, but Arthur was ready again.
‘...humanity of the…’
‘Vogonity,’ Ford hissed at him.
‘Ah yes, Vogonity - sorry - of the poet’s compassionate soul’ - Arthur felt he was on a homestretch now - ‘which contrives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other’ - he was reaching a triumphant crescendo - ‘and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into…into…er…’ (which suddenly gave out on him), Ford leaped in with the coup de grace:‘Into whatever it was the poem was about!’ he yelled. Out of the corner of his mount: ‘Well done, Arthur, that was very good.’”
Ha, all that fancy language to talk about poetry, that can kind of be bullshit, right? It’s kind of funny when people try to sound smart but they’re actually bullshitting, I guess, especially when they’re trying to sound pretentious or cultured. In another scene, Arthur and Ford are trying to escape a different Vogon captor with a different rhetorical line:
“‘Do you really enjoy this sort of thing?’ he asked suddenly.
The Vogon stopped dead and a look of immense stupidity seeped slowly over his face.
‘Enjoy?’ he boomed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean,’ said Ford, ‘is does it give you a full, satisfying life? Stomping around, shouting, pushing people out of spaceships…if it’s mostly lousy,’ he said, slowly giving the words time to reach their mark, ‘then why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?’
Arthur looked backward and forward between them in bafflement.
‘Er…’ said the guard, ‘er…er…I dunno. I think I just sort of…do it really. My aunt said that spaceship guard was a good career for a young Vogon - you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun ray holster, the mindless tedium…’”
What if there was an evil alien on a spaceship, but he maybe wasn’t happy about his job? Again, if you’re twelve, that’s pretty funny, but at some point, unless you’re Elon Musk, you’re going to outgrow that and look for comedy with a little more depth. And here’s the problem with Hitchhiker: all three of those block quotes I just shared with you, all of which I tried to condense as much as I could but are still obviously pretty verbose, are taken from between pages 40 and 49 of the novel. That’s a small slice of only ten pages. And the entire book - which is admittedly pretty short, the first Hitchhiker novel clocks in right around 50,000 words - is exactly like this, all of the time. It’s like how a dorky twelve-year-old imagines conversations with the friends he can’t seem to find. There are many books, books for children, that I haven’t outgrown; that is probably pretty obvious to you by now. But the book I couldn’t wait to get, the book my mom had to drive to the distribution center to pick up for me, the book that led me to a term paper and a whole new insufferable phase of my sense of humor - well, that feels like one I’ve started to outgrow.
Oh, also: Garnet’s pig did end up winning the blue ribbon at the state fair.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1974 medalist, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox.
I still am a big fan of the sentence “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
Passages from the “Guide” are usually presented in italics in Adams’ novels, but I’m omitting them here for simplicity and also who wants to read a big wall of italics.