An old favorite
Harriet the Spy is one of those books I’ve read dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. I had a handful of books I would always read when I stayed home sick from elementary school, and Harriet the Spy was my #1 sick day book by far. I think. This is what I had always believed about myself. But this week I re-read Harriet the Spy for the first time since those sick days, and…had I ever read this book at all?
Some parts of it were seared into my brain, particularly the illustrations (drawn by the author, Louise Fitzhugh). Harriet propped up on a window sill like it’s the edge of a pool, peering at the family inside. The wrinkled, droopy cardigan and the equally wrinkled, droopy face of Mrs. Golly, the mother of Harriet’s nanny Ole Golly. Who could forget Harriet hiding in the dumbwaiter, and most especially Harriet getting caught in the dumbwaiter? The very definition of iconic.
So I was shocked to realize that the dumbwaiter is barely in this book. It gets two or three scenes. Harriet only runs through her spy route once or twice. This book is not about a girl who uses curiosity and gumption to find out everything about everyone around her, as I would have described it. This book is about a girl who is lurking on the edges of the adult world and isn’t quite grown up enough to understand what she’s seeing, or often even what she’s feeling.
It’s also about an incredibly specific place and time: the Upper East Side in the early 1960s. It contains rather vicious satires of private school, novelists, modern dance (the onion!), magazine editors, and psychoanalysis. What about this extremely particular mid-century world spoke to me so deeply as an elementary school student in suburban California in the 1990s? I have no idea.
It’s a total cliché to say that the best children’s and young adult literature (/culture of all kinds) also appeals to adults, though of course it does. That’s how children’s books become classics, which Harriet the Spy certainly is. But this is no Pixar-y insertion of clever-enough jokes and references aimed at keeping parents turning the pages or restarting the movie for the thousandth time that week. This is a whole book about the limited perspective of childhood, written from the limited perspective of a child, that refracts into a rainbow of very grownup stories when held up to the prism of an adult mind. Some of these are extremely dark, especially Harriet’s friend Sport who, at 11-years-old, is functionally a parent to his domestically incompetent writer father. Some of them are only sort of dark, like Ole Golly’s escape from her wrinkled, droopy Rockaways roots into domestic servitude and then marriage. None of them are entirely rosy. There is not-insignificant thematic overlap with The Bell Jar, another book I re-read recently, which was published one year before Harriet the Spy. Harriet the Spy was far more unsettling, especially for this childhood devotee. Almost as unsettling as childhood itself.