Now and Then is a series of posts in which I revisit books (and occasionally not-books) that I loved when I was a child, comparing what I remember about them to how I experience them as an adult. It is also a movie from the 90s starring Christina Ricci and Thora Birch! Remember her? I wonder when she’s up to these days.
This was the edition I had as a kid. It glows in the dark!
Wayside School is an elementary school that is accidentally built thirty stories high, with one classroom on each floor, due to a mixup with the blueprints. (The builder said he was very sorry.) The series focuses on the class on the 30th floor, taught by Mrs. Jewls, who takes over after her predecessor Mrs. Gorf is turned into an apple. This happens in the first chapter of the first book, so at least you know what you’re in for. All three of the books are a series of absurdist highjinks, with the odd supernatural encounter thrown in. These mostly happen in or around the nineteenth story, which does not exist, where Miss Zarves, who also does not exist, teaches a number of students whose existence is up for debate.
Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger is the third book in the series, but it is the only one I will be reviewing for this entry, mostly because it was the only one my library had readily on hand and tracking down the other two (plus the supplementary arithmetic books) seemed like too much effort. In this volume, Mrs. Jewls reveals that she is pregnant and leaves her class at Wayside School in the hands of a number of substitute teachers. There’s Mr. Gorf, a handsome gentleman with three nostrils and a hankering for revenge; Mrs. Drazil, an old lady with a mysterious blue notebook and an even more mysterious connection to Louis the Yard Teacher; and Miss Nogard, who can hear the thoughts of her students with the third ear she keeps hidden under her hair.
Then: When I was a kid, I was sort-of-friends with a girl a few years older than me. (Her mother was my mother’s best friend, so our friendship only really happened when they met up to drink tea and gossip.) I was in awe of her because she knew a lot about Ancient Greece, could quote whole episodes of The Simpsons, and was very good at Mad Libs.* When she came over to my house she would usually read to me, even though I could already read. I let her, because being read to is a decadent luxury. Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was one of the books she read to me, and I thought it was the funniest book ever written, with the exception of Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic. I still had fond memories of it twenty years later, and was excited to give it another go as an adult.
Now: A few weeks ago, I found myself stuck on a bus with a number of university students. The university students had just returned from a sports game of some description, and many of them had their faces painted in celebration of the sports game. Most of them were drunk. A number of them were singing, and one of them attempted to remove my hat while slurring something at me that I couldn’t quite catch. I sat there, sandwiched between two of the youngest, loudest, Axe-smellingest human beings I had encountered in a very long time, and felt like an elderly spinster on the beach watching a school of mermaid toddlers frolicking in the surf.
Reading this book made me feel like that. Louis Sachar is a terrific writer, but Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was exhausting. This might be because I survived the “lol random XD” era of the Internet, or it could be because I am an old crankpot with no joy in my heart, but the trademark Wayside absurdity failed to charm me as an adult. Instead of making me laugh, it made me tired. Maiden-aunt-watches-the-mermaids tired.
That being said, there were a few jokes that hit home for me this time around. Like the joke about the elevators: when elevators are finally installed in Wayside School, Principal Kidswatter chooses to get a red elevator that only goes down and a blue elevator that only goes up, so all the children will know how to use them. Each elevator works perfectly—once. And then they never work again. Somehow the exact reason WHY they didn’t work a second time didn’t really dawn on me until reading it again at the age of twenty-eight.**
It also dawned on me that this is probably where my love for weird fiction began, because Wayside School is creepy as hell. The most interesting thing about rereading this book was the uncomfortable feeling of wrongness that pervades it. Even putting aside the whole “there is no Miss Zarves, there is no nineteenth story” thing—which sounds like something from a horror movie—a group of Men in Black live in the basement, the school counselor habitually implants suggestions in the students’ minds via hypnosis, and a man literally sneezes his nose off. And then a lunch lady decides to use it in spaghetti sauce. This is all meant to be funny, and for the most part it is, but there’s a dark tone to some of the stories here that I really didn’t notice as a child. The Miss Nogard chapters are probably the best example of this; she consistently uses her telepathic gifts to manipulate and insult the children on the thirtieth story, and in the final chapter attempts to throw a baby out the window. That is some Patrick Bateman shit right there.
It’s jarring to realize that the things you thought were hilarious as a child are deeply unsettling to you as an adult. But Sachar was obviously not writing for me, or for any adult. He was writing for children, and children love darkness in their stories. In a lot of ways, the Wayside School books are spiritual prequels to Holes, a novel about children being exploited and abused by authority figures. (And curses. And pig lullabies.) The authority figures at Wayside are patently absurd, but that element of danger is still there in embryonic form. Or newborn-baby-thrown-out-a-window form, in the case of Miss Nogard.
Fun Fact: Louis the Yard Teacher is loosely based on Sachar himself, who spent time volunteering as a playground helper to earn a college credit in the 70s. A quick Google search does not reveal whether or not Sachar had the same juicy moustache as Louis the Yard Teacher, but I really hope he did.
* At least, I thought she was very good at Mad Libs. In hindsight, that might have just been because she didn’t fill in every blank with some variation of the word “poop.”
** Let’s be real, this probably says more about what a stupid kid I was than it does about the quality of the joke.
The Mimsy 