A Year in Reading: Chris Ware

December 10, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 9 3 min read

coverThough as I kid I’d read The Long Winter, I was really more familiar with the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder via the long-running NBC television series, which recast her work as a warm paean to family togetherness during the cocaine-dusted, wife-swapping 1970s (and a show now appropriately preserved in the golden amber of the Hallmark Channel). Bolstered by the anti-sentimentalism of art school, I’d somehow fallen in line with this received opinion, dismissing her work as innocent and sanitized, of no real value except as a way of passing one’s time in a false nostalgia for a Good Old Days that probably never existed. But during a recent snowstorm here in Oak Park, Illinois, vaguely remembering a detail of Wilder’s Long Winter – how the snow drifted so high that she could watch the feet of passersby from her attic window – I started rereading the 1940 book with my daughter Clara, just to pass the time during our own little blizzard.

Well, was I proved wrong. Really wrong. Not only by the book’s utter lack of sentimentality, but by the surprisingly lean, stark, and even occasionally self-deceiving personalities Wilder brings to life through her clear memory and clean prose. Warmth and love were indeed present, but they were a warmth and love that felt absolutely genuine, forged of clinging, human suffering, and tempered to a ring of authenticity by the details of close-quartered familiarity its characters endured. Sacrifice, self-denial and desperation blow through the book’s pages, and the frozen panic suffered by the Ingalls family during that 1880-81 South Dakota winter ended up feeling almost as immediate as the snowstorm framed by the windows of our 98% Energy-Star-rated-furnace-heated house, my daughter taking refuge under a blanket in a hinged ottoman as shelter from the real-er snow of Wilder’s words.

coverOnce both storms had subsided, Clara and I started the nine-book Little House series from the beginning and set out on a tour of literary discovery that surprised and amazed me, from the grisly sweet early memories (the “pig-bladder” episode that every kid reader remembers) to her middle years following her possibly deluded father all over the midwest in search of a reliable land claim, to her onerous marriage and house-keeping with Almanzo Wilder. Looking back on the books as a single work, Wilder not only creates an almost sculptural sense of time’s passage – what it feels like to go from childhood to adulthood – but also seems to adapt her writing to the task, beginning with simpler words cradling simpler, childish images and ending with more detailed, complex, uncomfortable and disjointed chapters, the bone-lean accounting of her marriage in a semi-unfinished follow-up of her First Four Years with Almanzo in which their crops repeatedly fail, their house burns and a bereft neighbor asks Laura to make a gift of her only child acting as a bitter chaser to the whole.

Apparently I’m not alone in this rediscovery, as her work has inspired an explosion of post-NBC Ingalls Wilder-loving websites and memoirs, myriad fictionalized follow-up book series extending other characters’ lives (and I will nose-holdingly overlook the whole itchy connection of her daughter Rose Wilder to the Libertarian party though I won’t overlook recent scholarship which reveals her semi-fictionalized writing as a collaboration between her fact-flat mind and Rose’s more rounded powers of literary empathy) to her just this year being inducted, as a real literary writer, into the Library of America. Such a plaudit is justified. She breathes on the page as a clear-aired voice who speaks not only to children, but to the children that wii-playing/guitar-polishing/adventure-movie-watching America claims we can remain regardless of our age. In short, Laura Ingalls Wilder tells us, and tells us quite beautifully and bluntly, to grow up.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

is widely acknowledged as the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his mother and daughter. His Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award and was listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by the London Times in 2009. An irregular contributor to This American Life and The New Yorker, his original drawings have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and in piles behind his work table in Oak Park, Illinois. His most recent publication, Building Stories, was published in October 2012 and topped the New York Times Graphic Books Bestseller list.