I really enjoyed reading this collection of writers’ and cartoonists’ tributes to and commentary about Peanuts.
Some of the essays are better than others, and the themes are often repetitive,
but I am enough of a Peanuts fan that
I enjoyed the many different angles on similar topics. I was also delighted to
learn lots of new fun facts. For example, when Schulz’s favorite pen company
went bankrupt, he bought out their entire stock, and those hundreds of pens
lasted him through the rest of his career. In my opinion, the two poems in the
middle of this book were sheer nonsense, but every essay had something to
offer, and the occasional stories told in comic form were a pleasure to read.
I enjoyed learning about the
different ways that Peanuts has
influenced cartoonists and writers throughout the decades, and because of my
love for history, I enjoyed the glimpse into daily life in eras prior to my
birth. I learned a lot from this book, and I also had the personal realization
that I never grasped how unusually dark Peanuts
is. I was a cynical teenager beset by mental health issues when I started
reading the comic strip, so the dark elements of the characters’ situations and
relationships to each other all seemed perfectly natural to me, along with the
playfulness and joy. The strip reflected the highs and lows of my life at the
time, as I both struggled with life’s seeming futility and was overwhelmed with
happiness over the new friendships that I was developing that year. As all of
these essayists agreed, Peanuts
reflects the whole texture of life, not just the parts that artists usually
prefer to isolate from it, and our own stories become entwined with our
memories of Schulz’s characters.
My three favorite contributions to
this book happened to all be from women. Ann Patchett wrote a delightful essay
about her undying affection for Snoopy, explaining how he taught her everything
she needed to know about the writing life. Very few other essays focused on
Snoopy’s role as a novelist, and I loved what she had to say about it. Janice
Shapiro contributed a comic series about her childhood crush on Linus, and even
though I was too old to feel that way about Linus when I got into the strip, we
clearly have the same type. Her comic also explores the unintended consequences
of her local newspaper printing Peanuts
on its front page, because she and I also shared the childhood tendency to read
age-inappropriate news stories, feel an oppressive sense of gloom about them,
and experience a deep panic that other people did not understand.
My absolute favorite part of this
book was Elissa Schappell’s essay on Sally, which celebrated her personality
and creative confidence despite how frequently fans and critics overlook and
disregard her. I liked every bit of this, from the exploration of Sally’s
hatred for math, to her unrequited love for Linus, my favorite character, and
to how she treated her school’s brick wall as a choice confidante. This quote,
however, was my favorite:
“Sally’s detractors gleefully make
sport of her tendency toward malapropisms, the example most tediously cited, ‘violins
breaking out’ instead of ‘violence breaking out.’ To the unimaginative, this
seems like a catastrophic flub, but when you consider that no instrument is
more notorious for striking terror in the hearts of humankind, it’s fiendishly
difficult to play and unsparing in its resistance to being mastered - Sally’s
statement could not be more apt. ‘Violins breaking out’ means unrelenting
torture, agony, it means all hope is lost.”
Given that I could barely cope with
the piano, this resonated on a DEEP level. Yes. Yes. Sally is right! I guess this is why I have always liked her so much. She didn’t understand math or music.
Incidentally, I finished this book
on February 13th, the 20th anniversary of the last Peanuts strip. I’m glad that I got to read this when I did, because
I found it meaningful to reflect on Schulz’s work during the same week in
February, twenty years later, as his death and last published strip. His comics
are glorious art, clever social commentary, history, and human nature
contemplation all in one, and they brought me great joy, insight, and
consolation when I was in high school. I’m so grateful that I decided to read
his entire oeuvre back then, and reading this book was a wonderful opportunity
to think about how important Schulz’s work is to society and how much it
matters to me.
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