Where the Wild Things Are

Please don’t hold it against me, but I just do not get Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”  Good friends gave me a copy of the book when I began having kids of my own, and I was excited to crack it open for Camille (now aged 10) and Austin (aged 8).  

It never resonated.  It’s been on the shelf, forgotten until the media blitz for the new adaptation of the beloved 1963 book reminded me to dust it off. (Director Spike Jonze --whose “Adaptation” I absolutely love -- was recently profiled in the New York Times magazine and a novelization of the new script ran in The New Yorker.

Nevertheless, when I saw the preview, I felt nothing.  It reminded me of the first time I saw Stonehenge, as I stood there in that field thinking, “I should feel something, but I just can’t conjure it.”

The problem, lies with the main character Max, a boy who gets punished, talks back to his mother, and is sent to bed without dinner. (His mother calls him a “wild thing.”)  But, his room begins to turn into a forest, next to an ocean, with his own personal boat.  There, of course, he meets the true wild things, enormous monsters who gnash their teeth and show their terrible claws. But Max has a special magic which tames them, and he becomes king of the wild things.  That’s when the “wild rumpus” starts, which ends with Max harshly sending them to bed without supper.  Before he leaves, the monsters creepily say, “Please don’t go – we’ll eat you up, we love you so.”  But he sails home to find his mother had left him supper.

When we lived in Philadelphia, the Please Touch Museum had a Where the Wild Things Are section.  I remember my kids climbing on the vines, jumping in the red boat with the name Max painted on it, and dressing like wolves. Even with all those memories of whiling away the hours watching the kids play, it still leaves me cold... like that out-of-the way English rock formation.  (This Stonehenge tribute, however, I loved.)

The way it seems to me, is that Max is a rotten kid who, left to his own imagination, dreams of grandiose adventures tainted by his own rotten nature.  (A nature which needs to be tamed, but his mother goes back on the one punishment she doled out – the “bed without supper” part.)

So, I have to ask.  Am I the only one?  What magic does Max possess that doesn’t work on me?  I want to participate in the nostalgia that everyone seems to be feeling about the new adaptation, but the only thing I can conjure is a deep admiration for Max's cool pajamas.

Any Max appreciators who can help me understand?