Ramona's World, Beverly Cleary (365 Books, Day 179)

[rushthatspeaks]

This is today's, so I'm caught up.

As a quite small child, I read a great deal of Beverly Cleary; my parents were very fond of her and read her stuff aloud a lot, and I ran across more on my own, as one does. I've been going through a phase lately of rereading things I read very, very early (and wondering about my early tastes and those of the adults around me somewhat: there are sections of my brain that might as well be labeled Moralistic Victorian Children's Books, and I am not certain it is usual anymore for parents to give their offspring the entire series beginning with Five Little Peppers And How They Grew, but I digress). I hadn't read any Cleary at all since, oh, I don't know, turning fourteen? Some while, is what I am saying here, so I found myself in a library earlier today and I reread a whole bunch of the Ramona books.

Oh god they are so depressing.

You see, as a small child one does not focus much on the circumstances of the adults in the families of the kids one reads books about. They are there the way adults are generally, so that one knows they do things, and it sometimes registers that there are incomprehensible things going on with them, but they don't click as people. The adults in the Ramona books turn out to be financially struggling, realistically exhausted by eternal attempts to make ends meet, hemmed in by lack of education and a truly appalling pile of bitter circumstances. They are also loving, friendly, kind, and good parents and people, which is what registered with me as a kid. But we are talking about a book series here in which the protagonist's father loses his job, is out of work for three books, supports himself through night school as a grocery cashier, gets his degree as an art teacher, cannot find a job anywhere in his field, and then with great bitterness takes a job managing a grocery store because his wife is pregnant again and somebody has to bring in a paycheck; that's where he ends the series. That is one of the adults. There are others who have similar arcs.

So while I was sitting there in morbid fascination-- these books take about fifteen minutes to read-- I noticed there was one I hadn't gotten to, and the reason for that became obvious when I checked the copyright page, because it came out in 1999, which is well after I was fourteen years old. The first Ramona book came out in 1955, causing me to wonder whether a series regularly appearing for forty-four years is any sort of record. (Apparently Cleary is still alive, ninety-four this year.)

The latest one is exactly like all the others. It's amazing how little modern technology has impinged. The principal act of adolescent rebellion carried out by anyone in the book is getting her ears pierced without permission, at the age of sixteen. In 1997, at the age of sixteen, it was not my ears I got pierced without permission, it was my navel, and adolescent rebellion among just about everyone I knew involved vehicular felony and large quantities of alcohol. But I guess this is a virtue, that if you take the books of this series and read them one after another they read as all of a piece, they don't have that odd effect of technology and the times aging around children who are the same as ever. And yet it does not seem to be specifically set in the past, either, but in some place where people have just lived the same way since these books began till now. Disorienting, somewhat.

At any rate, I mean it, this one is exactly as the others are, clever and cute and charming if you have that heavy overlay of nostalgia, and with a deep underthread of terrible pain and fifties-style repression. If you're giving these to kids-- and why not, they did well by me-- this one is no weaker. If you're reading them yourself, out of memory, it's a good way to weird yourself out.

Comments

[kalmn]

oh, i had forgotten about the peppers books. i don't think that i was given the series of those, i think that i found the first one, and as some kind soul had given me permission to "work" in the school library instead of go to recess, i swept the entire series off the shelves and ate it whole.

[khava.livejournal.com]

I also loved the Ramona books as a child, but I remember having the distinct feeling that Ramona's family was Not Like Mine. In particular, there's one instance where the mother forgets to turn on the crock pot, so the family goes out to dinner even though they don't have much money. Ramona and her sister are SO EXCITED because they never eat at restaurants. My family ate out at least once a week. I remember, in my 8-year-old way, being like, WTF is this?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Wow. I wonder if you've pegged why I've had no desire to reread them, though I read them as a kid and liked them well enough. But then I only read each once, they did not draw me back to reread like the Melendy books did, and others.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oddly, my vivid memory of the Ramona books is when the girls try to get their father to stop smoking. My parents didn't smoke, so I'm not sure why this stuck out so much. Also my mom had to explain the term "car coat" to me.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Nosmo King! Yes, I remember that part too.

I'm glad to hear Cleary is still alive. She was the first author I ever wrote to, and I still have the postcard she sent back.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Wow, maybe that's why I read those books but never adored them - too much like real life!

[ryenna.livejournal.com]

These are still wildly popular where I work. They go out all the time, as do Cleary's other books.

There are several cases of series where the books either continue to come out for a long time or stop and then suddenly have a brand new installment ten years later. Most of them don't do quite so well.

And as an aside, Cleary lives in the same retirement community as my husband's grandparents. We waved to her once while walking the dog. She is apparently incredibly private.

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Huh. Thank you for this review, because it's actually surprisingly therapeutic for me.

I tend not to reread much because health issues make it hard to remember much about what I read even just a few months ago, leading to disorienting deja vu on most reread attempts on top of the "how did I not notice that at the time?" disorientation.

I read several Ramona books when I was about 8-9 years old, living in a chronically-high-unemployment area on the brink of the late 80's recession. That's just about the age when my father finally seemed to have settled into a stable well-paying job that could become a career, but he lost that job when the company was bought out, leading to months of unemployment before we moved far away to start over. Both my parents were bound and determined to never struggle financially like that again no matter what, to a degree I can now recognize as dysfunctional. By the time I was a teenager we were solidly middle-class encroaching on upper-middle-class, and yet I still struggle with some messed-up guilt about "wastefulness."

Your review reminded me that I stopped reading the Ramona books at the time because I was so gut-deep horrified at her -- far more than the book's adults, as I vaguely recall -- for artfully squeezing an entire tube of cheap toothpaste into the bathroom sink. It was a very isolating and uncomfortable feeling to react so vehemently against the protagonist at that age with no way to get a reality check. I don't remember the particular book's title, but I know the toothpaste incident was the illustrated scene on the cover of my library's edition with a clear view of her mother's face as she discovers the mess, and it made me so uncomfortable and even ashamed to look at it.

I was already a sensitive adult-approval-seeking kid and strongly identifying as A Bookworm by that age, but I think it was the first time I'd been triggered (and felt betrayed) by a book, and I'd forgotten all about it. Thank you for indirectly helping me find the old scar tissue so I can apply some perspective and self-therapy, now that I do have tools to do so.

(Edited a word choice in an attempt at clarification of vague memories.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I adored the Ramona books and reread them regularly, as a kid. I think the biggest reason was that I liked Ramona and her family so much. (I identified most clearly with Beezus, surprising no one.)

But I think a big part of the reason I liked them so much was precisely what you say about the undercurrent of pain. I first encountered the Ramona books when I was still being read to, and much of what we read were things like Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins mysteries, the Happy Hollisters, the kinds of children's mysteries written in the 1940s-70s. (Not all--we also read the Little House books, and Narnia, and E.B. White, and Edward Eager--but my mother loved mysteries and so did I, so there were a lot of children's mysteries.)

The Ramona books gave me a jolt of recognition, because they were books in which the father wasn't a successful lawyer and the mother wasn't a slim and pretty housewife. I didn't notice that they were depressing, per se, but I did notice that her family (like mine) couldn't go out to eat or on vacation at the drop of a hat. And people got mad at each other, and the cat got old and died, and yet it wasn't the end of the world.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

My family was pretty poor when I was reading those - I literally do not recall us EVER going out to eat in an actual restaurant (there was occasional sandwiches, takeout, etc from cheapo neighborhood countertop places - so it didn't strike me as depressing at all, just normal.

Years later, at age thirteen, when my family was still poor but beginning to rise, I began a no-smoking campaign on my Dad. Inspired by the memory of Nosmo King, I left signs literally all over the house. It worked! After several months of horrible screaming arguments, my Dad gave in and quit. He has not picked up a cigarette since.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that's why it didn't register as depressing to me, either: we'd had a lot of the same issues in my family (we didn't eat out except on very special occasions, difficulty finding employment, etc.), and I didn't think of my life as particularly depressing, so I didn't interpret the books as particularly depressing. Just, as you say, normal.

I am impressed that the Nosmo King method worked for you!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I think the reason it strikes me as depressing now is not so much the economic circumstances as that I totally didn't notice them and so I remember the books as being cute and funny whereas in fact all the adults in them have well-founded and justified angst. (And the books are still cute and funny.) If I'd registered the angst at the time it wouldn't be such a shock now, but I was really oblivious about adult behavior at the age I initially read these, and in order for me to notice economic circumstances in a novel they had to be hugely and explicitly flagged. Otherwise I didn't think about money one way or the other because it was a grown-up thing that people either didn't explain or explained in boring ways. So back then it was like 'well, they don't go out to eat often, my mother is always yelling about how restaurants are poisoning us with sodium and fat and additives so I guess they are more sensible than my dad is', and that kind of thing.

It is so cool to hear about that anti-smoking technique actually working! I wonder how many other people have tried it? That is a textbook example of a writer doing something objectively good for her readers.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I rememher the financial strains vividly, in those books, but I somehow have a patina of "it was written nicely/optimistically" anyway. I dunno, my brain whitewashes? (I do know that the earliest books, focused on Henry and/or Otis, definitely felt more time-bubbly to me, when young.)

I vaguely recall Dear Mr. Henshaw as having slightly more 'reality' to it, but I could be wrong.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Heh. The movie was true to the financial strains until nearly the end, but then let Dad be such a terrific artist that Ramona's school noticed his work, and gave him a job there. I'd forgotten or hadn't known they were never resolved in the books.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Wait, the Five Little Peppers has a series?

Good grief.

I still remember that cake Polly bakes with one raisin in it...

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

There are twelve of them. I seem to have only had the core three or four. I have fairly fond memories of The Five Little Peppers Abroad because it did not have as much moralizing and This Is How You Should Do Things.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Holy shit 12.

I had enough trouble with 1!

(Then again, I only read it for the first time last year. It's... very much a kid's book.)

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I just started looking at some of them on Project Gutenberg.

Naturally, I had to check if Jasper actually married Polly (as I was convinced he would do by the end of the first book)... That proposal scene is utterly horrifying! Holding hands across her mother's lap, and getting her mother to explain it to her! And then Jasper going off with the mother saying "I always wanted to call you Mumsie and now I can..." So very disturbing.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

And no wonder I liked the books so much. I have no recollection of the financial issues, but my father was going through something similar at the time, so I suspect I identified fairly strongly.