A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

Yesterday I expressed hyperbolic admiration for the beginning of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, John Irving's story-within-a-story from A Widow for One Year.

Today, for the first time, you can purchase the hardcover version of that children's story, retitled, "A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound," for $15.95 (three cents a word) at your local bookstore.

It is a word-for-word reproduction (yes, I checked) of the story The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls. There is only the title change and the addition of the single sentence, "It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound."

Confused? Whether you read A Widow for One Year or not, you should be. But let me explain. Irving included three of Ted Cole's children's stories in his novel:

The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls:   This is the book now available in print. It's about a little boy who hears a frightening sound in the middle of the night. It begins with the wonderful sentence I applauded yesterday:

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

A Door in the Floor:   This is the dark tale of a "little boy who didn't know if he wanted to be born," because of his awareness of the evil that awaits him. Even Irving terms it, "creepy," and "the darkest of Ted Cole's stories for children." Just to make it more confusing, it is also the title of the movie version of A Widow for One Year.

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound:   This is the third Ted Cole story to appear in A Widow for One Year. It is about a moleman who captures little girls. It is wholly unpleasant—which is why I was shocked when I originally thought that this was the story now published by Doubleday. To magnify its terror in the novel, Irving carefully waits to recount it until a moment when Ruthie, now an adult, faces a scene of true horror.

In the introduction to his just-published story, Irving says, "I am not a children's book author." (I predict that many bristle at that careful distinction.) He claims to have:

"...created a character named Ted Cole, a most unsympathetic writer of stories for children. Years of reading children's books to my own three sons has given me a low opinion of the kind of children's literature that is intent on frightening the very young; there is a long, stubborn tradition of it. In creating Ted Cole (one of the more willful villains in my novels), I was conscious of taking such an author to task."

If that's the case, then I contend he fails. As much as I loved the opening sentence, the story itself is flawed and the ending ambiguous rather than comforting. I specifically doubt that the explanation for the sound of a monster being only a mouse crawling between the walls is reassuring to most children. It still leaves the very real concerns of the mouse getting into the room with them, scurrying beneath their beds, and crawling between the sheets rather than the walls.

I read the story to the boys yesterday. "Tom woke up, but Tim did not," I began. But they didn't know about the ghosts of Thomas and Timothy. They didn't gasp in appreciation. The consonance I admired only confused them. "Which is Tom?" they asked. "Which one is Tim?" "Why is he in a crib?" "Oh, I think I know what woke them up." At one point Justin said, "This is starting to get scary," but at the conclusion—the disappointingly phrased, "And that is the end of the story."—he pronounced it only "so-so" (in Spanish).

I am scheduled to be a guest reader in the boys' classroom next month. I'm considering soliciting additional opinions.

I should comment on the illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann, though I am hardly a qualified art critic. I enjoyed her muted, moonlit blues and grays, and the teddy bear that accompanies Tom on his search of the house, as well as the long-shadowed mouse and the expressions on Tom's face. She does a great job creating a creepy atmosphere with shadows and by animating ordinary objects like dresses and pillows rather than depicting, "an armless, legless monster dragging its thick, wet fur." The boys commented on the illustrations, but failed to mention, I noticed, that neither parent appears in the book and that at one point Tom apparently ventures outside the house alone (I certainly expected the latter to draw comment from Kevin).

Illustrators have their own set of inside jokes. In Hauptmann's case, I spotted in the background of one illustration, a small photograph of a man in a wrestling outfit: undoubtedly intended to be John Irving.