“Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.”
More potently than any other novel I have experience with, Dandelion Wine exudes a warm, melancholy nostalgia not just from its text but even from its pages, cover and title. This was my third time reading it after reading it twice in high school, which means not much of it was still in my head after 30 years except for the basic notion of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding becoming conscious of the world and trying to savor his summer months in 1928 small-town Illinois. There’s not much I can say about the book that other reviewers haven’t covered, so I’ll just make a few observations. I didn’t learn until recently that it is actually a fix-up novel mixing the main Spaulding plot with several short stories that Ray Bradbury had already published elsewhere. I wish that wasn’t the case, I wish it had all been original for the book and planned as a complete novel, but I can’t deny that it works and that I would never suspect it’s a fix-up if I didn’t know. Details that stand out for me: 1) An early chapter about Douglas, on the cusp of puberty, lying in the woods and being overwhelmed by the sensuousness of nature, eating fruit, and feeling the breeze on his skin. Soon after, he goes to the edge of an ominous ravine next to town and is struck by the contrast of primordial wildness and civilization and wonders how the two can possibly be reconciled. 2) There is a serial killer in the town, targeting women walking alone at night. He has been conflated into an urban legend about a being the townsfolk call “the Lonely One,” an almost supernatural boogeyman figure that parents use to scare kids with and about whom boys tell each other tall tales. 3) A couple things foreshadow Bradbury’s next novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes; a traveling junk man with mystical powers is a bit like the lightning rod salesman in the later story, and in one chapter, Douglas and his brother Tom visit a carnival and are captivated by a lifelike fortune-telling machine that they “rescue” with the intention of reviving it to restore its powers of prophecy. 4) A few times, modernization is dealt with as a corrupting influence, i.e. the “happiness machine” a man builds that backfires by distracting him and his family from the true happiness in their lives together, Aunt Rose reorganizing Grandma’s kitchen and buying her a cookbook, which spoils the magic of her instinctive cooking skills, and Grandpa’s rejection of a miraculous new type of grass that would never have to be mowed. In keeping with the style of Bradbury’s numerous short stories, many of the vignettes are ironic or tragic in nature, with twists that emphasize punishment for not appreciating the here and now, and reward for taking time to smell the roses. Sometimes this technique can seem needlessly cruel, like Twilight Zone episodes, such as the young man who falls in love with a woman based on her photograph only to find out that she is really decades older than him, and the elderly man in a rest home who dies in the midst of calling strangers in foreign countries so they can hold the phone to their windows and allow him to hear bustling life around the world. One of the stories I enjoy the most involves Douglas’ best friend John Huff, also 12 years old, who seems to be everything a boy should be, agile, kind, brave and knowledgeable about everything worth knowing. Being forced to move away, John is worried about being forgotten. Douglas assures him that’s impossible, but when John shuts his eyes and asks Douglas to tell him what color his eyes are, Douglas can’t remember. This is key to the theme of the novel, as Douglas learns to celebrate the vibrance and diversity of life, but also becomes aware of death, loss, the passage of time, and the fleeting nature of memory. The overall feeling of nostalgia for the magic of childhood is off the charts throughout Dandelion Wine, but it isn’t quaint or cloying. It’s genuine because it’s Bradbury’s honest agenda and not seasoning added to artificially create a sensation the book wouldn’t otherwise have. What makes it great is Bradbury’s unabashed pleasure in his use of language, pleasure in memory and reverie, celebrating reverie, celebrating both sensory experience and consciously reflecting upon and analyzing the experience.
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