Ilan Stavans remembers Norton Juster, who died on March 8, 2021.
Norton Juster has died and suddenly the world feels flat. He was always whimsical, poking fun at the way we approach childhood—"Too seriously!" he would say. "Each child is different. Sometimes the most shy, the least conventional is the most insightful."
I hadn't read The Phantom Tollbooth growing up. I don't remember it being available in Mexico in the seventies. When someone introduced me to Juster (as it happened, we lived only a few blocks away from each other), I delved into it. What a joy! Not surprisingly, it reminded me of Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll was a lecturer in logic and mathematics at Oxford; Juster was an architect who taught at Hampshire. I will forever cherish our three-hour breakfasts in which he talked to me about his father's propensity for verbal puns, about his time in the army, about his meeting with Jules Feiffer, about how he came up with the name Milo for his protagonist and how Milo was like him. He was a mentor and a friend and an inspiration. And also a clown. Once, we did a conversation for the NPR podcast "In Contrast." He had everyone in stitches. On the way out of the studio, a photographer took a shot of us: in it Juster has his tongue out.
When we started Restless Books, he was astonishingly supportive. He wanted to be part of the Advisory Board and frequently commented on how our books were expanding the menu of American literature. He was particularly enthusiastic about Yonder, our imprint of books for young readers. One of the early stops in The Phantom Tollbooth is a place called Expectations, which, the reader is told, needs to be a quick stop; otherwise it becomes a trap. In other words, Juster didn't waste energy in wanting to satisfy others. What was essential to him was to have fun in intelligent ways, through the use of language, because, in his eyes, that is our most precious gift: the capacity to describe the world with wonder.
He gave me, as a present, some notes he had scribbled about why children are shrewder than adults and how you can't really fool them, no matter how much you try. The key is to remain in touch with yourself as you were in childhood, he said, otherwise things are unbearable.
Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books.