Retro Reread: From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

It's here, y'all. The parenting phase I have been waiting for. My daughter is finally old enough to read all the books I loved as a kid! I tried Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden awhile ago, and in both cases the flowery, turn-of-the-twentieth-century language was too dense for her. Not so, it turns out, for things written in the 1960s.

This is the edition I own, printed in 1977.

So I read my thirty-year-old copy of From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler aloud to her over the course of a couple of weeks. If you're not familiar with the story, it tells the tale of two children who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming embroiled in a mystery over a statue the museum has recently acquired. I loved this book as a kid, with its art-based mystery and kids hiding among museum antiquities. My husband, not much of a reader himself at that age, also loved it, and so when I kept on reading long after bedtime so that I would not have to interrupt the fountain scene (where Claudia and Jamie take a bath in a fountain and find they can continue to fund their adventure by grabbing all the wishing coins on the bottom), he readily agreed that of course I couldn't stop then, that was the best part of the book.

As a writer, I kept on thinking about things from this book (first published in 1967) that I don't think would pass muster today. For one thing, this book includes Detailed Instructions For Running Away From Home, which, though fanciful, are pretty good? I wonder how that was received at the time. Apparently without too much hand-wringing, since the book won the Newbery Medal.

What I completely forgot about, however, is the framing device of the book. The entire thing is a letter from Mrs. Frankweiler to her lawyer, Saxonberg, about why she is changing her will. It includes frequent parenthetical asides to Saxonberg, which caused my daughter to repeatedly ask me who he was and why we were suddenly talking to him. The point of view is a bit loosey-goosey, since Mrs. Frankweiler claims she got all this information from a long talk with the siblings at the end of the book, but there's a considerable amount of interiority expressed from the kids throughout, and I doubt they told her in detail about how exactly they were feeling while eating pie at the Automat, but whatever, it works. (Also, the Automat! Explaining the concept to my daughter was so much fun. I am too young myself to have eaten at one, but my husband thinks he maybe had a meal at one of the last surviving examples sometime in the 80s.)

One thing this book gets right is the brother-sister relationship with Claudia and Jamie. They fight. A lot. There are so many passages where they snipe at each other about money and grammar that I started to abridge them while reading aloud because my daughter would not understand why Claudia thought Jamie's sentence structure was uncouth. But they are a team, and they love each other, and that comes through perfectly without anyone ever having to spell it out.

As an adult, I was struck by how utterly unconcerned the kids are about their family's reaction to them running away. (As a kid, I didn't think about it at all, either, so I think Konigsburg got that aspect of it exactly right as well). They sent a letter to their parents saying they were fine and no one had kidnapped them and not to worry and that was that. Mrs. Frankweiler is rather dry when she informs them that yes, their parents are indeed worried about them, and their disappearance has featured in several newspapers. Their confidence in gallivanting around New York City by themselves (and never being asked by an adult what two kids their age are doing on their own) seems like a remnant of a different time to me, when kids had more freedom to roam. Perhaps city kids today get around with more freedom than they do here in the burbs.

So From The Mixed-Up Files definitely holds up, keeping my 7 year old entranced for several weeks' worth of bedtimes. In a future Retro Reread I'll take a crack at Harriet the Spy, which has some real yikes moments to a contemporary reader. Thanks for (re)reading with me!