Few authors have had as much influence on my progress as a human being - to say nothing of my writing - as @DanielPinkwater. The course of my life was profoundly altered by reading Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars in middle school, and I have read dozens of his books since.
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I find that many distinctive authors circle themes and plots, like a cannoneer rangefinding with artillery, trying to bullseye some impossible-to-define perfect target. I county myself in that group, and I definitely count Pinkwater there.
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I can't tell you exactly what it is he's trying to hit, but every book seems to come closer to some irreducible Pinkwaterian ideal, and his latest, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, is the closest he's come yet.
tachyonpublications.com/bestselling-au…
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First, let me attempt* to summarize the plot. Dwergs are basically a magical race inhabiting the Hudson Valley. They're something like Tolkien's dwarves, but not. Male dwergs are pretty odd-looking and rarely venture into the world.
*"Attempt" is doing a lot of work here.
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But female Dwergs, like protagonist Molly O'Malley, can pass for short-ish humans, albeit with very large feet and the ability to move with uncanny speed through the woods near Kingston, NY.
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Molly can't abide the sameness and dullness of life in the unchanging, eternal Dwergish village of her birth, so she moves to Kingston, NY, where she befriends Arnold Babatunji, a Naples-obsessed restaurateur who runs the Hudson Valley's greatest pizzeria, who hires Molly.
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For a time, life is good. Molly learns about pizza, pals around with a former boy-genius who runs the village radio station, and sleeps in a forest dwelling of her own devising, supplementing her income with the cash from the lumpy Dwergish gold coin she's pawned.
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But the pawn-broker is tied up with gangsters - some of them ghosts, some living - and then Molly befriends Leni, an indigenous girl whose people have lived in the Catskills since time immemorial.
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Leni tempts Molly to ride the Greyhound to NYC, where she rides the subway, and, more importantly, samples the indescribable wonderments of papaya juice and all-beef franks, which change her life.
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And of course, while in New York, Molly encounters Carlos Chatterjee, a Revolutionary War reenactor who runs a spectacular junk shoppe on the mezzanine of an uptown MTA station.
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Carlos turns out to be crucial to the resolution of Molly's main challenge, which is the transdimensional meat-robots in British redcoat uniforms who seem to be bent on reenacting the 1777 burning of Kingston (spoilers!).
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Averting this disaster is a big project for Molly, who enlists the Catskills Witch (who has moved to Manhattan) and the semi-mythical King of the Dwergs, who uses bee-style waggle-dancing to advise them.
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This is a book with:
So.
Much.
Stuff.
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My all-time favorite place to eat in NYC is Shopsins. Pinkwater novels are like expanded Shopsins menus. Motto: "nothing exceeds like excess." But this isn't mere kitchen-sinkery: it's skilled wunderkammering, a carefully curated study in contrasts.
shopsins.com/menu/shopsinst…
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Pinkwater insists that his books aren't "weird" and even bristles at the suggestion:
I take him to mean that he's describing the world as he perceives it, not adding any weirdness. We live in a weird place. 2020 certainly proves that hypothesis.
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I think there's something to this - the thing that makes Pinkwater's work so great is his ability to describe the everyday absurdity in terms that make it clear how weird normalcy is (and vice-versa).
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That's definitely Dwergish Girl's charm. I read this to my 12 year old, who is way too cool to be getting bedtime stories of her old, irrelevant father's favorite weird writers.
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Every night, she insisted that she didn't want me to read from it. Every night, she begged for another chapter when I was done (and interrupted repeatedly to ask incisive questions about the Revolutionary war, papaya juice, ghosts, radio announcers, etc).
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Pinkwater's got The Magic (whatever that is) and he keeps getting better at it.
eof/
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