The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

It goes without saying that we all loved this book as kids and the fact that there is a movie just made us giddy with nostalgia. I really only read this novel though because Dave Eggers wrote it. But I can’t say he did a good job with it. There is much more to the story obviously than we gleaned from the short children’s story, such as Max’s parents are divorced and somewhat distracted, and his sister is in her teenage bitchy years. Wanting to escape from this, Max sails (for years) to the place where the wild things are. Max announces that he is their king and is there to solve their problem with the chattering noise they hear underground. Good start but then this conflict with the monster below is never developed. It seems that the worst thing Max is there to end is boredom. The enact a pretend war, where Eggers just looks to entertain his young audience by talking about how the wild things gnawed on each others’ arms and pulled up chunks of the earth with lava on it—simply put, silly stuff. They then decide to build a fort, taking up the last fifth of the book. This book was obviously suited to a generation much younger than me but I thought it would still follow the basic principles of a tale. In my opinion, it would have been much better had Max come to the place where the wild things are and helped them defeat something pretty much harmless, like the dark, and then left to go back home, not because he had to but because he was simply getting hungry and had to be home for dinner. That’s what I imagined the story to be anyway.