Summerbooks #14 and #15: Two New-to-Me Pinkwater Books

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 Bushman Lives!, and Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, by Daniel Pinkwater


As long-time readers (if any) know, Pinkwater is a favorite of mine and in fact built large sections of my brain in my youth.  But these two are fairly recent, being only a decade or so old, and I had never gotten around to them -- largely because I was quite disappointed by one of his newer books in the late 90s and was cautious about reading more.  However!  A few months ago I happened upon a ranked list of every single Pinkwater book ever, which is over 100 titles and includes quite a few different genres, so not an easy list to rank.  Anyway, this guy thought Bushman Lives! was pretty great, so I thought I would give it a try somettime, and that time was now.

Harold Knishke, disaffected high school student, lives in Chicago, and his coming-of-age story involves deciding to learn to draw, getting interested in art, and meeting all the strange people in the Chicago art scene.  Really, this is transparently an autobiographical story with large dollops of strangeness added (I'm willing to believe that 1960 Chicago may have featured a man with a perforning chicken, but there probably wasn't a house bigger on the inside that had to be held together with continuous coats of whitewash).  There are also some people (Victor, if you've read Lizard Music) wanting to recruit Harold to help row out to a camouflaged island in the lake, where the gorilla Bushman still lives.  The story simply ends in the middle of the action, and so I read Adventures of a Dwergish Girl in hopes of it being a sequel.

Pinkwater's two aims in his writing seem to me to be to convince the reader of the power and importance of art (which includes general weirdness as a side benefit) and also of Zen Buddhism.  Not that he goes around saying "hey, we should all be Zen artists," just his stories are definitely driven by those two things.  Plus a great love of food.


Molly van Dwerg does feature in Bushman Lives! and helps Harold in his quest, but Adventures of a Dwergish Girl is set earlier and is her backstory.  Molly is a Dwerg -- which are a slightly magical forest-dwelling people living in the Catskills.  Some Dwergs do go to school in the outside world, and when Molly does so, she decides that she'd like to give the English world a try.  So she heads off to the comparatively big city of Kingston, gets a job in a pizza parlor, and makes friends with another girl who introduces her to the chaos and joy of New York City.  Soon they realize that some sinister folks are intending to re-enact the burning of Kingston (in the Revolutionary War) and use it to commit some major crimes; how can they be stopped?  The Catskills Witch (now of Yorkville), Carlos Chatterjee, and Oom Knorrig can assist, and chaos ensues as Molly pursues her destiny.

Did this story contain the conclusion to the other one?  No.  And the next one, Crazy in Poughkeepsie, doesn't seem to either, though it's still about Molly (her destiny is in Poughkeepsie, the Yorkville Witch told her so).  The guy who ranked the Pinkwater books thinks this is perfect -- ending on the cusp of revelation! -- but I don't know.  Hmmm.  Crazy in Poughkeepsie looks fun, though.  Definitely going to get on that one.

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