[Book Review] ‘The Neddiad’ by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

"The Neddiad" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

I don’t know too many kids who grew up reading the way I did. Most of the kids I knew struggled to read, and most of what they read was pretty trashy stuff. Thriller books, ghost stories, books about high school kids having sex and getting killed by serial killers, and so forth.

But not me. Nope. I was reading the works of Daniel Manus Pinkwater, an author whose surreal, fantastic novels were the closest thing to a drug trip my mind could endure without actually abusing some kind of chemical.

Pinkwater wrote a lot of strange children’s novels in the ’70s and ’80s. I’ll touch on some of them in other reviews. But for now, I want to discuss a recent title of his, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization.

It’s hard to describe a Pinkwater book without first explaining that the plot itself is inconsequential. That might sound like a slam, but it’s really not. Pinkwater seems to start his books with some vague idea of where they’re going, and he occasionally remembers to use techniques like foreshadowing and plot structure to pull you along. But sometimes, he just gets lost in his own wackiness and lets things go crazy. This was definitely true in some of my favorite novels of his, like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and Borgel.

The Neddiad starts off with a young boy writing about moving to LA in the 1950s, and quickly gets derailed into the realm of the weird when young Neddie is accidentally left behind at a train station. He befriends the son of a famous actor, meets a phantom bellboy, and has a bizarre encounter with a shaman named Melvin who gives him a little stone turtle to take care of. Neddie’s adventures veer off into tangents, and there’s not much of a sense of purpose behind the plot until the last third of the book, when the villain is finally introduced and things rapidly move towards a climax. In the meantime, the reader is treated to some really wonderful scenes and characters that seem like they were thrown in simply because they were interesting to Pinkwater at the time. One such character, Yggdrasil (also known as Iggy), serves very little purpose in the story aside from being the smart female companion to Neddie and his friend Seaumus in the second half of the book. (She’s the main character in the sequel, so I’m assuming her limited role was included for introductions’ sake. But it’s hard to tell with Pinkwater.)

Though this is a children’s book geared at the advanced chapter book kids, I found it readable and rewarding as an adult as well. I’ve never had a problem picking up a book marked “Young Adult” and reading it for pleasure. Sometimes, those books are the most imaginative, and it’s refreshing to read a book where hammy love stories aren’t being forced in and awkward sex scenes don’t have to be skipped over. Plus, Pinkwater’s books tend to feature overweight characters who are interested in mundane things and who don’t mind getting themselves into odd adventures. I love that.

One scene with this book will stick with me for awhile. Neddie and Seamus make friends with a boy whose father owns a circus, and the children watch as an old horse is taken out to pasture and shot dead by circus handlers. The boys are surprised, but the son of the circus owner explains, “Well, the lions have to eat something…”. It’s a chilling scene, and one of those moments where the book leaves the safe confines of fantasy and edges into reality. Most writers couldn’t pull it off, but Pinkwater’s good enough that the darkness is contained by some truly wacky moments elsewhere in the novel.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who needs a light, humorous read with a hint of fantasy to it. Fans of Norse mythology will also get a kick out of some of the allusions in this title, though they’re not too pronounced.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan