A Review of Charlotte's Web
Sunday, Oct. 11, 2020
The Saturday night hopes of a twenty-five-year-old single male in New York City generally can be pinpointed somewhere on a triangle, one which spans the vertices the reunion and ensuing merriment with his brotherhood now liberated from the workweek, the chemically-aided plunge of his psyche into the unexplored transcendental depths, and, most strongly, the relentless pursuit of his every licentious desire. Yet despite these prospects on the night of October 10, 2020 I gravitated toward a fourth vertex--somewhere off the plane that defined single-maleness. Floating toward this point I had found myself reuniting with, for the first time in almost two decades, the geese, the sheep, a literate spider, a family of farmers, Templeton, and some pig.
It was my plan that Saturday night to study in detail E. B. White’s craftsmanship of Charlotte’s Web, his most famous work and perhaps the most famous children’s novel in America.
Towering high in my list of favorite writers stands E. B. White at first, even above the stratospheric culinary memoir authors Anthony Bourdain and Jim Harrison. Somehow where the air is thin and the craft could not be thought to ascend that high, White almost makes it look painless to write better than anybody else. During an enviable fifty-years tenure at The New Yorker, White left the adult world numerous essays from great eras of his life, from the lucid Here Is New York to the deeply personal Death of A Pig (Charlotte’s Web is commonly seen as White’s attempt to make up for failing to save his own pig). He left the writer world The Elements of Style, a guide to prose originally written by his Cornell professor William Strunk Jr. that White had taken to revising, more than doubling its original size from 42 to 85 pages by the third edition. These accomplishments alone would do it for most writers. But perhaps it was White’s inability to revel in his excellence that he had engaged in work many storied writers would consider beneath them: He left the children world three novels.
Of these, both Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web are still well-known today due to film adaptations. Having first read Charlotte’s Web when I was wee and unaware that E. B. White was a genius, I remember the warm feeling of standing next to Fern Arable and looking on at the lively animal conversations in the Zuckerman barn. Now as a man I reasoned I ought to be able to reread Charlotte’s Web in a single night, confident that I could take on the lightweight novel that clocks in at 31,938 words and a 4.4 ATOS book level, lest I deserve public humiliation.
But as expected of the rare work that attains immortality, the novel punches far above its weight, though punching in its weight class would be frowned upon and probably illegal. I spent my five-six hour night in equal parts the act of reading and in some mix of amazement, remembrance, and bittersweetness that took severe hold of my faculties. This children’s novel is quite good. For one, the subject matter catches the adult off-guard. In this novel the intended eight-year-old demographic is met with innumerable deaths, the agony of loneliness, murder, accidental assault, destructive tendencies, drinking the blood of one’s enemy, plotting and deceit, existential dread, the inevitability of growing apart, the struggle of obesity, insomnia, the ever-looming threat of slaughter, the exhaustion and thanklessness of a life of service, the oppression from the straight-cis-white-man, and the heartbreak of striving hard to achieve something you absolutely need only to find that you were never good enough, and axes. White trusts the young reader to navigate these in their own way, regardless of inexperience or innocence. And White also challenges them on the front of vocabulary alone: That 4.4 book level might warrant an eight-year-old to embark on this world with the aid of a dictionary sidearm. If the adult made it this far without so much as a pause (no congratulations), White’s fluency in farm living is sure to teach or remind them much of a world long-forgotten. While reading Charlotte’s Web, it is impossible for an adult to reconcile that E. B. White is simultaneously the author of this children’s book and still the king of the essay. He can write for both your eight-year-old-mind and your twenty-five-year-old mind perfectly.
Perhaps the reason why every writer, burgeoning or experienced, ought to read or reread Charlotte’s Web is to remember the elementary lesson of being an author: To trust the reader. Trust that if you hold the vocabulary just above the reader’s range they will leap up in order to understand. Trust that even with scant details the reader will see the characters as real, letting the machinery of their imagination provide the rest. Trust that the reader will think about the bigger picture of the heavy topics you have shown them long after they have turned the last page. Trust that the reader will interpret your own story different than you have and to trust that, as unintuitive as it may be, different interpretations work. Trust that, as the author, you are merely a guide to the story, characters, and world, where the reader ultimately must walk on their own, only able to appreciate the beauty you intended to show them if they themselves gaze out and absorb the scenery along the trail, drawing their own conclusions and forming their own memories.
And we have none other to look for treasured examples of trusting the reader than from E. B. White, or perhaps from his pig-saving alter ego, Charlotte A. Cavatica.