Open the Door and Enter: Three Times
The door that moved. Photo ©Uma Krishnaswami
I’ve always been fascinated by doors. I’m even trying to use one as a portal in a novel that is, I’m sad to say, currently refusing to bend to my will.
This door. with its brass crossbar latch and its loop for a dangling padlock, once hung in my grandparents’ house in south India. When the house was sold, my parents moved the door to a new house in a different city. As a result, I have this sense of doors being more than stationary objects that let people in and out. Also who can forget the doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? (The humble one remains my favourite.)
The first of three door-themed books to land on my desk was A Door is to Open by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Julie Morstad. Start with the endpapers, with their many doors drawn over what looks and feels like the back of a manila envelope. Doors link mysteriously to one another with a zigzag staircase. Some are half-obscured by curtains. Others feature cutouts—a keyhole here, a crescent moon there. The back endpapers reveal their own surprises.
The text is understated, beginning with the title as its opening lines. Maclear uses direct address in an unfussy way. Occasional glancing rhymes mediate the rhythm. Halfway through the book, a line about doors made of words plants the suggestion that this book itself might work like a door. A trap door spread offers danger, before the page turn brings relief. Another burst of tension opens up the facing page, unfolding it to invite the young reader to library story time. Doors in nature, doors opening to magical worlds, endless choices of doors—they’re all in here, in picture book homage to Ruth Krauss and Remy Charlip and also, I’m fairly certain, Crockett Johnson.
As I was mulling over A Door is to Open, another door-themed book appeared on my horizon—This Is a Door by Daniel Nayeri—a happy coincidence to stoke my door obsession. I requested the e-galley, opened the file, and found myself off to the races. I’d really enjoyed Nayeri’s autobiographical Everything Sad is Untrue and lost myself in the combination of fabled setting and ripping good storytelling in The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams. This one’s as dazzling in its own way.
Asserting the “doorness” of this book in its title, Nayeri’s not joking. He takes on the hero’s journey with an unassuming hero embarking on a mythic-scale quest, with charming companions and obstacles galore. It’s a kind of door to the concept of the hero’s quest, even while it’s playing with the very idea. All this while crossing the epic-scale border of death itself. You know the old saw about never killing off your hero? Forget it! The book leaps right over that convention, using (I am being serious here) typeface calisthenics and grayscale font. I’ve invited Daniel to a blog interview in one of our Process Talk posts, so closer to its scheduled October publication date, I hope to dig more into the making of this book.
I tripped over the third book—Door by Jihyeon Lee—literally, nearly scattering a bookstore display. In the process, naturally, I opened the book. I turned a page, then another and another. This is a wordless book and I trade in words, but this one drew me in completely. A boy finds a key and unlocks a door. He enters a strange world with beaky-headed people doing perfectly ordinary things. His hesitation is overcome by hunger, and there’s an image you have to see to understand just how skillfully a picture can express such a visceral experience. This is a book to linger over. The first door leads to many other doors and when the boy finally returns the door itself has changed. Ambiguity is everywhere. Apprehension about strangers and strangeness is overcome by connections forged from generosity and trust. Under the lightly drawn pictures there’s something powerful at work, as well as a little subplot focused on the cryptic little winged character who shows the boy the key to begin with.
And once I began to think about these three books, all together—well, not to sound grandiose or anything but this post pretty much wrote itself. My door novel may still have its problems. Undoubtedly, it still needs work. But writing this post, I’m reminded that it continues to matter to me, so I’m not giving up on it. Not yet.
