Emily Jenkins, Harry Versus the First 100 Days of School

drink menus & ostentatious flatness

“She is a round person with streaks of pink in her hair and lots of rings on her fingers.”

Imagine children’s literature, with its manifold flavors of prose, as a drink menu.

Dav Pilkey (he of Captain Underpants and Dog Man) would be chocolate milk: naughty, yes, but proudly so, silly and somehow not quite objectionable. Roald Dahl would be fermented quince soda: sophisticated, singular, but with a slight puckery sourness bordering on the unpleasant. C.S. Lewis would be an antique wooden box of loose Earl Grey: expensive, subtle; may take a bit of work to get your kid to actually drink.

Eighty percent of the chapter books you find on library shelves (the superhero/unicorn/princess books that you can read aloud for hours without absorbing a single detail) would be flat store-brand orange soda: thinly cheerful, insipid; probably carcinogenic if consumed in sufficient quantities.

All of which — the fine flavors and the not-so-fine — occasionally leaves me in a state of sensory exhaustion. My poor taste buds have, after hours of Pevensies and Never Girls, been teased and prodded and tickled into aching submission. I crave nothing but a cool glass of water.

And at long last I’ve found it: Emily Jenkins’ Harry Versus the First 100 Days of School.

Harry is a scrupulously realistic chapter book about Harry, a new first grader at PS48 in Brooklyn. Jenkins narrates his story with startling uninflected-ness:

“Harry Bergen-Murphy has a pack of ten yellow pencils.

He has last year’s water bottle.

He has a new Fluff Monster lunchbox and new green sneakers.”

This seems at first to be a deficiency of style — the affect of a crossing guard who can no longer muster a facial expression as yet another throng of kids come spilling off the bus. But Jenkins is the author also of The Toys Go Out, a book of Milne-ian playfulness and grace; she is, in Harry, up to something.

And that something turns out to be not so different from what Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk are up to in their ostentatiously flat autobiographical novels, or what Hemingway and Tim O’Brien are up to in their deadpan war novels. Jenkins is presenting a reality so granular and authentic — and so serious to its inhabitants — that style would register as a kind of disrespect.

A few chapters in, just as Harry is getting acquainted with the bustle and demands of the classroom, Ms. Yoo, the art teacher, visits.

“She is a round person with streaks of pink in her hair and lots of rings on her fingers. She handed out watercolor paints and invited all the kids to make self-portraits.”

This is a kid’s hungry, absorbent, non-judgmental attention in prose form. Ms. Yoo’s shape (a round person) isn’t compared to anything, or joked about; it’s merely noted. The rings on her fingers aren’t scrutinized for signs of character (gemstones? metal spikes?); their presence is merely recorded as in a police report. A comma or a contraction (there are strikingly few throughout the book) would contaminate the purity of the seeing. This isn’t boredom; this is silent staring. This is data-gathering.

And my daughter, listening to the book, attended to the story (though “story” makes the book sound busier than it is) with exactly the same solemnity and intensity as Harry. Harry is tormented by the teasing of a boy named Wyatt and then, with no heroics or histrionics, he sorts it out. Harry stays home from school sick with a fever — he plays Go Fish and watches animal videos with his mom — and then he gets better. My daughter’s expression throughout had the special raptness of someone granted access to surveillance footage of her own home; she needed to know what happened here.

Every aspiring writer is perpetually — and sensibly — encouraged to find her voice. You must attend to the particular music of your own diction and sensibility and then, having found it, you must never let it go.

But sometimes, when you’re writing about something especially grave or elusive, you do need to let it go. You need to sound like nothing at all. And the brilliance of Jenkins’ book is that she understands that for children, school is often just such a subject — at their craft tables they’re grappling with love and loss; at PE they’re wading through a foreign jungle.

With its transparent prose and natural pace, Harry is not, you realize, a book about first grade. It is first grade, the frightening and thrilling and tedious experience itself, dried and preserved and ready to be bloom into life. Just add water.