There's a Mystery There

March 6, 2017
Journalist and author Cott (Days That I’ll Remember) reflects on his friendship with Maurice Sendak and explores the late children’s book author’s themes and styles from different psychological and artistic perspectives with the help of experts in those fields. Cott traces Sendak’s roots and influences to a variety of figures, including his emotionally unavailable mother, Mickey Mouse, Mozart’s letters, a young girl from his neighborhood in Brooklyn who served as his muse, and his childhood preoccupation with the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping. A psychoanalyst discusses Sendak’s remarkable ability to depict childhood rage and an art historian provides interpretations of Outside Over There’s illustrations. Playwright Tony Kushner recalls his own friendship with Sendak and expresses his appreciation for the author’s unflinching portrayal of catharsis, the “uncivilized, primary-process... desires and behaviors.” Cott approaches Sendak from virtually every angle, making this a remarkably complete picture of a complex and dynamic oeuvre. Career-spanning color reproductions of Sendak’s art are included for reference.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
Conversations with the legendary children's book creator, along with "companion guides" exploring the artist's psyche and works.This text expands longtime Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott's (Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, 2014, etc.) 1976 Stone interview with Sendak, which Cott reworked in his collection of children's author profiles, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (1983). The author interweaves discussions that followed over the years with family photographs, aesthetic influences, and book art in the first publication with the benefit of distance since Sendak's death in 2012. Cott examines his subject's relationships with relatives--particularly the artist's melancholy mother--and recurring themes and obsessions: babies, kidnapping, flying, falling, mortality, windows, and journeys. An overview of key titles follows, focusing on the enigmatic Outside Over There; Sendak described this conclusion to the trilogy that began with Where the Wild Things Are as "the last excavation of my soul." Writing it helped vanquish lifelong demons. Cott is an erudite, sensitive observer, exceedingly well-prepared to engage readers on the title's (and creator's) mystique. Equally at ease probing Mozart's views on death as he is the similarities between Sendak's naked goblins and a 17th-century scene of frolicking putti, Cott's thoughtful questions include quotes from luminaries ranging from Homer to Rumi. Sendak's narrative featuring Ida, a girl who rescues her baby sister from the goblin's underworld (as the depressed mother pines for the seafaring father), is expertly mined in separate chapters. Psychoanalyst Richard M. Gottlieb notes the artist's gift for plots employing fantasy to manage rage, and Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck discusses art's role in restoring one's archetypal mother. Art historian Jane Doonan deconstructs design, style, and symbolism, while playwright Tony Kushner recounts his friend's yearning for paradise. A continuous thread explores the complex interplay between "inside and outside" and the possibility that the story transpires in Ida's imagination. With minimal redundancy, the voices culminate to illuminate an extraordinarily rich picture book, provide fresh insight into human needs, and inspire appreciation for the rewards of looking closely.

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Starred review from March 1, 2017
Actually, in one sense, there's no mystery about it: the late Maurice Sendak was, as the New York Times put it, widely considered to be the most important children's book artist of the twentieth century. Such geniusnot too strong a word to use in Sendak's companyinvites a thoughtful and thoroughgoing examination of his work in the context of his life, especially the formative years of his childhood. Happily, Cott has given us just such an examination in this splendid book, based in part on his own interviews, and those of others, with Sendak. While he doesn't stint on his examination of the body of Sendak's workmore than 100 books illustrated, and 16 both written and illustratedit is Outside over There (1981), which Sendak regarded as the most personal of all his books and his own favorite, to which Cott gives the greatest attention, aided in his explication by four companion guides, a psychoanalyst, a Jungian analyst, an art historian and children's-book scholar, and the playwright and Sendak friend Tony Kushner, all of whose perspectives on Sendak's work Cott offers through his in-depth interviews with each of them. Fascinating and compellingly readable as all of this is, there remains something ineffable about Sendak's work, for, yes, when all is said and done, there is a mystery there, one that Cott conveys beautifully.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)