Tom Deveson reviews The Wild Things by Dave Eggers
Always an admirably candid reviewer, Deveson is not greatly impressed by this novelisation of the Sendak classic...
In a trick of reverse alchemy, Dave Eggers's latest novel transmutes pure gold into base metal. He has taken the 300 words of Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak's great picture book from 1963, and turned them into nearly 300 pages of trivial fiction. ... Adult irony is replaced by adolescent goofiness, subtle suggestion by clunky parallelism, endless wonder by cut-price Freud. Anyone who can write "the giant creatures were infant-like, almost cute, and at the same time, pathetic, tragic" has betrayed his readers, changing rough magic into wordy emptiness. TOM DEVESON
Leave a comment