From the Mixed-Up Files Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
By E. L. Konigsburg
Author: E. L. Konigsburg
Rating: ★★★★
Last winter I passed by Strand Books and they had this gem of young adult fiction for sale for a measly 48¢. I wondered how this book differed from the movie I remembered as a child. I’m delighted to say that it doesn’t merely hold up, but is actually more rich and more enjoyable as an adult reader. This enjoyability is in part driven by some of the clever narrative structures Ms. Konigsburg used to frame the meta-awareness of the story as it is told. On top of this, it’s also a snapshot of New York before its gritty descent of the late seventies: it’s still a place where a visit with Grandma to the Museum and Schrafft’s with white gloves might have played out over a hazy, warm spring day.
A Clever Device
Ms. Konigsburg’s clever device is that the story is framed as an omniscient narration of the children’s adventure as written in a letter from Mrs. Frankweiler to her lawyer, Saxonberg. This device is clever for several reasons. First it allows Konigsburg to lecture adult readers via Frankweiler’s admonitions to Saxonberg. Second, as she takes Saxonberg aside, she is taking the adult reader aside to narrate what’s happening in the emotional landscape between the child protagonists of the story, Claude (Claudia) and her little brother Jamie (James). Many of the quotes I transcribed are related through this device and they added an element of joy to my read of this novel.
Background
The movie made a deep impression because it was one of the first stories where the children were having relatable “young person” problems. Claude is frustrated at home about wastebaskets and sibling care and her parents' disturbing proclivity to make more siblings. While I didn’t suffer the same burdens as Claude, I did recognize that sometimes it felt like your desire to be an individual ran against a bunch of obligations and that that didn’t feel great. Ms. Konigsburg does a wonderful job communicating that experience of kids to kids, but also to any adult reader who might have lost some empathetic proximity to what (their) kids might be going through.
I also think this book made a deep impression because it was my first picture of children in my peer group growing up in a very different life. While we don’t see much of it, the exterior sets of Greenwich, CT and NYC were very different from my life in Texas’ suburbs.
Retro New York City
As a resident of Gotham, I loved this barely-historical-to-me era in which the story was set. There are enough (wheezing) vestiges of Old New York such that I recognize that decayed glory of 1950’s Manhattan, but it’s also just before a time when a flailing Ford administration, Watergate, and the Son of Sam will make NYC the place of Death Wish and Escape from New York. Close to Fifth Avenue, the children get to haunt some icons in their final days.
I looked up these iconic stops in some historical archives and was delighted with what I found.
Major hat tip to Ephemeral New York.
The Olivetti Store
Located on 5th Avenue, this gorgeous space looked like a mausoleum, and featured a portable typewriter out front on the avenue for “testing out.” Claude types a letter on this device (poorly, as noted by Mrs. Frankweiler who edits the poor work).
Exploring the industrial age in style
Schrafft’s
Schrafft’s exterior
Loved and lamented after its demise, Schrafft’s offered a nicer-than-average lunch for “just a bit more” than you might have paid at an automat and a bit less than you’d pay for lunch at a hotel. Famously loved by newly-independent working women as well as ladies-with-children in town, Schrafft’s ice creams were apparently quite the thing (old timers still wax rhapsodic about it). Schrafft’s gorgeous Fifth Avenue location must have been quite the experience in Deco glory back in the day.
Schrafft’s 1920’s Image
Chock Full O’ Nuts
While I’ve seen the coffee can around for years, I had no idea it was part of a venerable brand of coffee restaurants. The ubiquity of these coffee shops rivals the modern Starbucks.
Chock Full O’ Nuts
Conclusion
It was a quick, fun, read and celebrates that instinctive need of a child entering adolescence to own more of their own identity, to have boundaries in their lives, to have secrets, to make friends far-away and to have discoveries of their own without being patronized. I very much enjoyed it.
Notes
{
"title": "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler",
"author": "E.L. Konigsburg",
"highlightCount": 16,
"noteCount": 0,
"annotations": [
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "In the meantime she almost forgot why she was running away. But not entirely. Claudia knew that it had to do with injustice...[adolescent chores etc.] [a]nd, perhaps, there was another reason more clear to me than to Claudia. A reason that had to do with the sameness of each and every week. She was bored with simply being straight-A's Claudia Kincaid. She was tired...of the monotony of everything.",
"location": 12
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time -- especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with teach other.",
"location": 43
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "If you think of doing something in New York City, you can be certain that at least two thousand other people have that same thought. And of the two thousand who do, about one thousand will be standing in line waiting to do it",
"location": 5
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "But lying in be just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for o free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.",
"location": 87
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I guess homesickness is like sucking your thumb. It's what happens when you're not very sure of yourself.",
"location": 88
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "In front of the Olivetti place on Fifth Avenue",
"location": 100
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "a Chock Full O'Nuts on Madison Avenue",
"location": 110
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...she had discovered something: saris are a way of being different. She could do two things, she decided. When she was grown, she could stay the way she was and move to some place like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else --- the Indian guide even --- and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.",
"location": 113
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...but what can you do about a polite letter of rejection? Nothing, really,except cry. So she did.",
"location": 116
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "\"I want to go back different. I, Claudia Kincaid, want to be different when I go back. Like being a heroine is being different.\"",
"location": 118
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "\"Well, Claude, we just traded safety for adventure. Come along Lady Claudia.\"",
"location": 124
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "\"The only kind of deal I can make concerns money, and we don't have any more of that.\" You are poor, indeed, if that's the only kind of deal you can make.\"",
"location": 134
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is every enough. Except the apart you carry with you.",
"location": 38
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts",
"location": 147
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you you can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them.It's hollow.",
"location": 150
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Because after a time having a secret and nobody knowing you have a secret is no fun. And although you don't want others to know what the secret is, you want them to at least know you have one.",
"location": 155
}
]
}