Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

"Tom, a couple weeks ago, I found out I was alive.  Boy, did I hop around.  And then, just last week in the movies, I found out I'd have to die someday.  I never really thought of that, really."

I feel like the books at the Goodwill in tony Middletown are like twice as expensive as those in the Goodwill at that sketchy strip mall in Hagerstown, but that didn't stop me from buying their copy of HP55, the early 1967 paperback printing of Ray Bradbury's 1957 novel Dandelion Wine.  Even the huge price sticker with which the Goodwill people wrecked the cover didn't stop me.  Such a purchase was easily justified as a souvenir of my visit to fair Middletown, after all. 

The forty chapters of Dandelion Wine, a book of 184 pages, are not numbered and have no titles, but isfdb identifies it as a fix-up novel; large portions of the work consist of stories that originally appeared in mainstream magazines like Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and McCall's, and it certainly feels like a bunch of stories with a similar tone and setting.  Several chapters original to the novel would later appear as short stories in Bradbury collections under titles not affixed to them in this book.  (isfdb helpfully numbers the chapters and identifies the stories associated with each and where to find them.)

The story that gives the novel its title first appeared in Gourmet.
"The Happiness Machine" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post;
at the internet archive you can see a scan of the magazine, including the good 
realistic illustration of a husband observing as his wife tests out his machine.

Dandelion Wine is a paean to childhood in a walkable town in the Middle West, a sort of chronicle of one twelve-year old boy's summer of 1928, during which you might say he "came of age."  Douglas Spaulding and his ten-year-old brother Tom set out to record in a notebook all the significant events of that summer, one of which is the family's annual ritual making of dandelion wine; one bottle is produced for each day of the three summer months, and during the cold dark winter the beverage will be drunk as a means of remembering the warm summer days.  I am tempted to compare Dandelion Wine with the Combray sections of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, also a portrait of the happy life of a boy with a lovable family in a small town/countryside milieu, and also concerned with preserving and reliving memories, but Proust's immortal work is of course largely about love and sex and social class, issues Bradbury here addresses but rarely.  What Bradbury, alum of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Weird Tales, offers that Proust does not is science fiction and supernatural/horror elements.

Bradbury in some of his more straightforwardly science fiction work expresses skepticism of new technologies like TV and the automobile, and the science fiction material in Dandelion Wine is used to illustrate this kind of conservatism.  One townsperson who is handy with tools and electronics builds a happiness machine--you sit in it and have the experience of travelling around the world, hearing beautiful music, breathing clear temperate air, etc.  His wife takes a test drive in the machine, and reports it has made her miserable--she has now tasted delights she cannot consume in real life, and is now painfully aware of shortcomings in her life of which she had been blissfully ignorant.  At the end of that chapter it is pointed out that the real happiness machine is a stable and tightly knit family.  

A guy proposes replacing the Spauldings' grass, which must be mowed weekly, with new fangled grass that only grows so high and need never be mowed; Grandfather Spaulding explains why this is a terrible idea--for example, manual labor is good, keeping you busy and giving you a refuge from social life in which to think.  The well-meaning innovator finds Grandpa's line of argument convincing, and by the end of that chapter is mowing the lawn with enthusiasm.

All the characters in Dandelion Wine are skeptical of change, or are innovators who are forcefully shown the error of their ways.  When a well-meaning cousin tries to help Douglas's grandmother, a magician of a cook who follows no recipe and never serves a dish a second time, by introducing to the Spaulding's chaotic kitchen rational organization and to Grandma's improvisatory cuisine modern methods and a cookbook, the result is inedible dishes; the Spauldings and their boarders band together to force this visiting cousin out of the community at once lest she ruin Grandmas' natural born talents and doom them to a future of inedible meals.  The retirement of the town's electric trolley and replacement with a bus is seen by Douglas as a terrible tragedy.  

"The Trolley" debuted in Good Housekeeping and would be included in the 
collection S is for Space.

Nostalgia is a major theme of the book.  Obviously, a 1950s book that paints a rosy picture of 1928 is going to be inherently nostalgic, but the 1928 characters themselves are also nostalgic, expressing a fascination with the 19th century and a penchant for reliving their own personal histories via an array of methods, though the most common is describing their early lives at great length to others.  (It may be a traditional joke that young people find oldsters' reminiscences a bore, but the young people in Dandelion Wine relish hearing these old geezers go on and on for hours!)  One bit I thought particularly clever was when an elderly shut-in, a man the kids call "The Time Machine" because he is eager to relate to them the thrilling adventures of his youth, telephones a friend in Mexico City so he can hear the street noise of that bustling metropolis.  On the trolley's last ride before replacement by the bus, the conductor glowingly describes to the kids community events to which the trolley carried passengers twenty years before.  

Fantasy and references to the supernatural are at the heart of the book, and there is also a vein of realistic horror reminiscent of crime fiction.

Early in the novel, in a chapter later printed in short story collections under the title "Illumination," Doug, out in the woods with Tom and their father, senses something creeping up on him, a thing like an entity he sincerely wants to meet and is afraid he will scare away, the way a child might yearn to attract some bird or small animal and fear he will spook it.  When the something arrives, it is the revelation that Doug is alive, and should fervently recognize and embrace this fact rather than take it for granted.

In a comic section, an unattractive woman discovers that her attractive rival for the presidency of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge has purchased via the mails some books on witchcraft.  This frustrated woman blames her rival's alleged sorcery for her own shortcomings, like her lifelong clumsiness, and challenges the alleged witch at a Lodge meeting; she acts more like a witch herself than does the target of her ire, concocting and drinking her own anti-magic potion and making a fool of herself.  This conflict does have a happy ending, though, with the women reconciling and both accuser and accused being firmly embraced to the bosom of the community.

The one section of the book that addresses the topic of sexual love revolves around reincarnation.  A young journalist meets a woman in her nineties who never married and they become fast friends, she describing in detail her trips around the world to all the great cities, the two of them imagining they are the same age and he explored those exotic climes with her.  They are soul mates, somehow tragically born at dissonant times, and the old woman worries that throughout history their souls will meet again and again, always unable to consummate their relationship because their bodies are always decades apart in age.

As the reincarnation episode demonstrates, Dandelion Wine is not all sunshine and happy endings.  While Doug has the affirming epiphany at the start of the book that every moment of his life is to be cherished, near the end of the book, after many of those fascinating old geezers have died, one of his best friends has moved away, and the town has been witness to a horrendous crime drama, he recognizes equally the reality of death and concludes that no thing or person can be truly relied upon, as all must ultimately fail or die, himself included.

This brings us to the crime drama.  Sitting alongside the chapters about how much everybody loves ice cream and how great it is to have a big family of generous parents and grandparents and how scientific and technological advances are to be shunned is a subplot about a serial killer who stalks the town, killing a woman every month in the dark ravine that cuts through the town.  From the perspective of a genre fan, perhaps the best segment of the book is the chapters about one thirty-something woman who must descend into this ravine alone on a dark night just hours after herself discovering one of the serial killer's victims, a story that made it debut in McCall's under the title "The Whole Town's Sleeping" and would go on to be included in many horror anthologies.  Reinforcing the book's theme of the essential nature of family and community, the townspeople have given this serial killer the name "The Lonely One," suggesting his monstrous evil is the result of his failure to integrate himself into society.

Taken as a whole, Dandelion Wine is a sort of sampler that offers examples of various facets of Bradbury's body of work--many sappy sentimental stories, a few horror stories, plus the anti-progress SF tales; many of the stories offer the kind of ancient wisdom that might be summed up in cliches on the order of "stop and smell the roses," "savor the small things" and "the key to happiness is being content with what you have," and many of them stuffed with poetic metaphors.  Personally, I prefer the fear stories and the heartbreak stories, but none of the sunny sentimental pieces is bad, and I can't disagree with any of those hoary nuggets of advice, nor can I fault any of the metaphors or poetic passages, all of which work.  And the sweetness of the sentimental bits is cut by some bitter psychological realism, such as the disappointment of the kids when the serial killer's reign of terror is ended--it will make town life less exciting!--and Doug's desperate employment of the defense mechanism of hating his close friend when he has to leave town.

So, thumbs up for Dandelion Wine.