Dandelion Wine
at Amazon.Com
Endless Summer
A review of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine
By Rogers Cadenhead
Dandelion Wine, the 1957 novel by Ray Bradbury, is about a summer in the life of a 12-year-old boy and the people he grew up around in 1920s Illinois. The protagonist is Douglas Spaulding, a thoughtful child trying to make the most of the season.
This book takes a highly romanticized view of the world Bradbury grew up in, with its ice wagons, door-to-door junk men, porch-front conversations, home-cooked meals and three or even four-generation households.
The novel is completely enamored of childhood, celebrating the carefree freedom of a boy who can spend hours contemplating the benefits of new tennis shoes:
... they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water.
"Dad," said Douglas, "it's hard to explain."
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Dandelion Wine contains hundreds of these breathless odes to life in Green Town, the city of 20,000 that Bradbury has modeled after his own Waukegan, Illinois. The book takes its name from wine bottled by Spaulding's grandfather every day during the summer, which captures the essence of that brief period of time for remembrance later.
The book is highly sentimental, offering a nostalgic view of the past in which the pleasant moments are exaggerated and unpleasant ones are scrubbed clean or forgotten entirely. A good example of this is when the Spauldings lose a family member, a traumatic event that has little impact because the survivors immediately accept the loss.
There's no overall narrative driving the book -- it follows summer from beginning to end with a series of one- to five-chapter stories presented in chronological order. The stories are often disconnected from each other, sometimes featuring characters with slim connections to Douglas Spaulding. He's a minor character in chapters that detail the chaste love affair between a newspaper reporter in his 20s and a woman 70 years his senior, present only when they meet for the first time at an ice-cream parlor. One wonders if such a relationship would register on a child's psyche at all.
Also, the book contains some sexism that doesn't age gracefully -- a husband marvels at how his wife's thoughts move effortlessly from her brain to her hands as she handles menial responsibilities. "There seemed no long periods of thought for her," he ponders thoughtfully. The same woman is described as follows:
She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question.
There's also one jaw-dropping moment when a bestial herd of stampeding bison are described as having "heads like giant Negroes' fists." One hopes this race-as-animal metaphor, present in the 1969 Bantam Pathfinder paperback edition that I read, hasn't survived to current printings being used today in schools.
Bradbury describes Dandelion Wine as "magic realism," and while it is frequently magical it is almost never realistic.
This is most evident when a serial rapist and murderer shows up in Green Town and claims a third victim, leaving her dead in a ravine that is the children's favorite playground haunt. The killer, dubbed the "Lonely One" by the townspeople, scares everyone into keeping indoors, save for a single woman in her 30s who walks home alone after seeing a Charlie Chaplin movie.
The book is so relentless in its sentimentality that a killing spree fails to dampen any enthusiasm for the period. Douglas, who has seen one woman's lifeless body surrounded by police and onlookers, expresses disappointment when the larger-than-life killer turns out to be human rather than something more grandiose.
Dandelion Wine is exceptionally well-written in places, which makes it possible to forgive other dreadfully overwrought passages. The novel represents a love letter from Bradbury to the lost world of his youth and is prone to the excesses of love, showing little benefit of hindsight. He presents the events as a child would, insulated from the harder edges of life and the complexities that you discover about your past long after experiencing it.
Fans of Bradbury's work should appreciate the novel's insight into his early life, given the strong autobiographical character of Dandelion Wine. He once used Douglas Spaulding -- which combines the middle names of the author and his father -- as a pen name; the distance between protagonist and writer is a short one in this book.
Those who are reading the book for other reasons may be disappointed, as I was, and left hungry for a more mature exploration of that period. A child's precocious perspective is fitting when a story is structured around youthful experiences, but Dandelion Wine tells the contemporaneous stories of more than a dozen adults. Those tales are much better told elsewhere.
This book continues to be one of Bradbury's best-loved, but I have to side with embittered students who are inflicted with it as a reading assignment. On Amazon.Com's page for Dandelion Wine, the 90-plus reviews contain an entertaining disparity between adoring adults and teens who found it rambling and pointless, such as this Los Altos, Calif., student:
Since it's summer now, and my childhood, technically, is still here, I don't particularly feel the need to wallow in Bradbury's nostalgia. Perhaps, as an adult, in my four-bedroom house, with a two-car garage, spouse, kids, etc., after a day of boredom and work, 9-5, I'll be able to read this book and enjoy it, convoluted language and all, and sigh over joys long gone. But until then, I'm afraid I'll have to play the part of the rebellious teenager and give it only two stars.
Douglas Spaulding's grandfather tells him that dandelion wine allows you to briefly relive a day in your past. Once the bottle's gone, though, you must give that day up -- "no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now."
As good as the book was in isolated moments, Ray Bradbury stumbled over his past in Dandelion Wine.
Copyright 2000 Rogers Cadenhead. This review was originally written April 4, 2000, from the 1969 Bantam Pathfinder paperback edition of the book. I bought it secondhand from Richardson [Texas] Public Library, where I spent many days during my own Dandelion summers.
