Book Review: The Ghost of Dibble Hollow, May Nickerson Wallace

[juushika]

Title: The Ghost of Dibble Hollow
Author: May Nickerson Wallace
Illustrator: Orin Kincade
Published: Scholastic, 1965
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 368,150
Text Number: 1346
Read Because: see note below, from my personal library
Review: A boy's summer vacation at his mother's childhood home is greatly enlivened by the appearance of a young ghost with an mystery to solve. I love the cognitive dissonance and unexpectedly effective nostalgia of a haunted summer, but the actual execution is fairly textbook: the atmosphere is more fun than evocative, the mystery is gently engaging, and the pacing is predictable and effective. What's most striking about this book the ways in the which it feels dated: sometimes quaintly, like the changed idioms and the spelling of "cooky"; sometimes unpleasantly, in the tiresome gender and family dynamics; but particularly in that Bradburian nostalgia for a lost, idealized, all-American, boy's country summer—but without Bradbury's remarkable intensity. It's not a nostalgia I value or share.

⁂

I inherited this from my father's bookshelves—not when he died, but ages ago when they were book culling and I picked out anything that caught my eye. I grabbed it off my shelves because I'm doing a cull of my own. So I'm glad to finally've read the thing. I found it interesting rather than belovèd, but now it feels weird to toss a forgotten little book from my dad's childhood—even if I didn't love it, even if I don't know if he did, even though it's hardly a forgotten childhood classic (although most of the reviews are from people who grew up with it and view it fondly); his name is still in the inside cover.

It made me think about nostalgia: about holding on to a book I don't care about; about the particular variety of nostalgia this book leans into.

It reminds me of Ray Bradbury, who I generally love; but I never finished Dandelion Wine,I thought the The Halloween Tree was twee, and otherwise-lovely Something Wicked This Way Comes underwhelmed me because, like Dibble Hollow, Bradbury places idealized boyhood against/within gothic Americana, but: 1) it's not my ideal and therefore 2) the gothic elements don't foil it effectively. That perfect summer which is threated by interruption (and, for the adult author/reader viewing through the lens of nostalgia, which was interrupted by adulthood) isn't my summer; that's not my idyll or my anxiety. I'm sure there are better essays than the one I could ad-hoc about Bradbury and the limitations of idealizing a very local, specific variety of childhood.

But Bradbury at least goes ham. There's so much nostalgia and so much gothic anxiety. This excess is what reads as twee, but it's also an ethos that permeates his work & it does much better when it's more oblique, ex. as the emotional resonance in his science fiction.

But in Dibble Hollow it feels like ... did that ideal childhood ever exist? did it really exist for Bradbury? did it exist at all for May Nickerson Wallace, about whom I can find exactly zero information? The anxiety is so easily resolved in Dibble Hollow—the stakes are low, the atmosphere is weak, but also the economic problems and social turmoil of a small town are all resolved with the mystery plot so that the idyllic boyhood is promised to go on forever: ghost gone, bridges mended, all longing and anxiety whisked away. It feels like the nostalgia for nostalgia, which renders something almost like a pastiche. It feels older than 1965 ... but at the same time very 1965, looking stubbornly back at the hollow fantasy of "the good old days."

Comments

[starshipfox]

It's interesting to read books that have belonged to family members, but especially charged after that person's death. It's hard to know what to bring to the text. The idea of this kind of childhood / summer is always very alienating to me -- I think there's something particular about the boy's perspective that is hard, because I've very much enjoyed Elizabeth Enright's "Thimble Summer" even though it's about a summer and childhood that is equally alien to me.

[juushika]

I have a play that my dad gave me not long before his death which I'm barely been able to look at--because I know he wanted me to read it, because it's connected to his death, and because I don't think I'd like it, which brings a whole host of complications; yeah, it's hard to know what to bring (or what I'm bringing) to the text. So I sort of appreciate this random book as a dry run, because it's a little less charged. I've been avoiding most things that remind me of him; I may have had a weird interaction with this one, but I didn't avoid it. That feels like it must be a positive change.