An overextended dad joke with literary aspirations. As for Milo, he returns home transformed, no longer a bored sad sack, now eager to savor “the special smell of each day.”Īnd yet, despite the actor’s audible affection for the book, the story itself struck my middle-aged, 2019 ears as more effortful than effervescent - less Swift or Carroll or Baum than third-rate Marx Brothers.
“This is the exact tune George Washington whistled when he crossed the Delaware on that icy night in 1777.” Nearly everything in the kingdom is at cross-purposes, but with the help of new friends - Tock (part dog, part timepiece: a literal watchdog) and the jovial if ineffective Humbug (a nice nod to “Oz”) - Milo rescues the princesses Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, who restore to the realm a measure of just what their names suggest. “For instance, look here,” she tells Milo, opening a drawer and pulling out an envelope. He is a hopelessly incurious and blasé boy who, we are informed in the very first sentence, “didn’t know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always.” Milo’s deliverance from intellectual and spiritual torpor is the titular tollbooth, a gift left in his bedroom by persons or forces unknown, which grants him entry into a fantasyland of his own: the “kingdom of Wisdom.” Motoring along Stuart Little-style in a breezy electric car, he visits the warring cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis escapes the circuitous, enervating roads of the Doldrums is briefly stranded on the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping, of course) meets a conductor whose orchestra plays colors visits a curator who has a vault where she files away vintage sounds so they don’t interfere with new ones. So, five decades later, as I listened to Wilson’s performance of Juster’s book, I felt as if I were meeting the hero, Milo, for the first time.
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