The novel is the product of a rather unusual case of creative license. It’s based on the upcoming film, “Where the Wild Things Are,’’ which Eggers co-wrote, which is, in turn, based on the classic children’s story by Maurice Sendak.
Our plot is simple enough. A troubled nine-year-old named Max runs away from home and winds up living amid a pack of huge, chimerical beasts. Eggers, whose first book was the wildly popular memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,’’ has spent much of his career writing, in one way or another, about childhood. He has an intuitive grasp of what it feels like to be a kid - that volatile mixture of aggression and vulnerability, of wonder coming up hard against fear.
The first third of the book sketches Max’s turbulent home life. His dad has left; his mom is distracted; his older sister wants nothing to do with him; and Max’s rage at all three causes him to lash out in the ways commonly available to enraged nine year olds (i.e. he floods his sister’s room).
We’re supposed to view Max not as a “problem’’ child, merely one reacting to the losses he’s absorbed. Eggers works his case a bit too hard - his version of overweening suburban parenting is more caricature than characterization - but his voice remains faithful to his hero’s rambunctious spirit.
Here, for instance, is Max describing his mom’s sappy boyfriend: “Gary was folding himself into his old white car, licked everywhere by rust.’’ A bit later, he says, of a beloved neighbor, “Mr. Beckmann’s eyes were dangerously alive, punctuated by brows so thick and mischievously arched that he seemed at all times to be plotting a great and dastardly plan.’’
Once Max reaches the island of the beasts, Eggers goes for broke. We get a writhing Technicolor landscape of carnivorous vines, lava beds, mini-tornadoes, mutant snakes, and, of course, the beasts themselves, a motley bundle of brawn and neuroses.
