Far - but not Far Enough

Too Far's ending brings everything back to the world of the mundane. Robbie's dad and Fristeen's mom are the Dream Man and Dawn, and though the children try to reach some sort of salvation through a shivering winter storm their parents just bring them back home. The book then ends with a short epilogue about the ever-presence of the location Too Far, a seasonless place of ever returning warmth and love.

What needs to be understood before all else with regard to this book is main focus is its characters. Robbie and Fristeen are seen to grow throughout the book as they grow together. But, much of what they say is decidedly not child-like. Creating a new geography and mythology for a place that they had discovered themselves is definitely what six year olds would do. But more often than not their dialogue is too advanced. They sound more like teens than kids.

Their mismatched dialogue may just be the result of the narrator's tone. It's quite clear that these kids are being taken seriously, which is a great thing. Taking them so seriously, though, really brings out a lot of assumptions. It's a way to build suspense, but more often than not the promise of that suspense is not fulfilled.

Until the book's final scene, I was sure that the kids were going to jump from a mountain, or actually be immolated - that they would die one way or another. Ending the book with a return to their mundane lives undercut the suspense it had generated in that it the actual outcome was far less than anything expected. Shapero lifts us up on flights of fancy and leaves us crashing to the ground at the end.

Yet, such a grisly end would greatly undermine the book's central theme of growth. The epilogue reinforces this theme, and does a decent job of it, in spite of being a shortcut to such reinforcement.

Ultimately, if you can suspend your disbelief about the maturity of six year olds, and a blurry line between the mundane world and the fabulous things kids can dream up, Too Far is your book. Its writing is strong enough to carry you through, but not quite enough to make this an absolute must read for everyone.

All Downhill From Here

Too Far continues to chronicle the contrasting worlds of two six year-old Alaskans. Both of their home lives are shown to be in tatters, while their travels into the woods take them further and further into the world of Dawn and the Dream Man. Chapter 10 also sees the book's climax come about, Robbie's dad finally leaves.

Within their realm of fantasy, the Dream Man offers similar strife. He offers to take Fristeen and Robbie into the realm of dreams as pure thoughts, but gives Robbie a preview of the pain involved in shedding their bodies by sending a dream about his house and his body being engulfed in falling fire.

Shapero's style remains subdued throughout this nightmare, but it's his wont not to overwhelm with vivid description. Instead, he uses single images or metaphors to describe just about everything that is dream-like or found in the forest depths. It's a style that's easy to appreciate, though as the book's worn on more words are being used twice in the same sentence.

This repetition is distracting when it comes up, but only mildly so. Luckily, I'm still wondering about what Robbie and Fristeen will do with the offer of freedom in the forest enough not to mind such distractions.

Alaska in Summertime

Chapters seven through nine see Too Far remain heavy. Robbie and Fristeen explore more of the woods, and come across the burned out remains of a cabin where they believe the Dream Man and Dawn live. The Dream Man being the entity that Robbie has ushering him into dreams, and Dawn being a spirit of every new day's joy that Fristeen first encounters in her dreams.

As they make further discoveries in the woods, though, both of their homes become increasingly frail. Fissures begin to open up between Robbie's parents. In the simplest terms, his dad dreams of seclusion in a hand-built cabin in the wilderness, while his mother misses the intelligent company she'd found in California. Living in Alaska begins to take its toll on them both, it seems, and, of course, this indirectly gets pushed onto Robbie.

Meanwhile, Fristeen's mother (?), Grace, falls in love again. However, as Fristeen points out, whenever she falls in love (which Fristeen believes she never truly does), she forgets about everyone but herself. This causes Fristeen to become deeply frustrated.

But all is well when the two go deep enough into the woods. It may well be a matter of time before they go so deep that there will be no coming back for either of them.

Don't Touch that Dial

As if things weren't dense enough, a recent section of Infinite Jest proved that it can be much more so.

It's a section concentrating on Mario and Madame Psychosis' radio hour. What makes the chapter stand out from those seen thus far is that it is entirely centered around the radio. Three characters are followed in this section: the sound engineer, Madam Psychosis, and Mario. But the only thing connecting them is their relationship to the radio during the time of Madam Psychosis' broadcast.

For such an ethereal layout, the most grounding of the three characters is Madam Psychosis. Her parts are so grounding in part because of the chant-like list of diseases and disabilities that she reads from. The engineer, being nothing more than a student and given very little in the way of dialogue, is the most ephemeral. Mario isn't somewhere in between these two, but is instead made to be a deeper mystery than he's ever been before. He's definitely deeply intelligent, though he's socially witless in the extreme.

On top of following three characters connected by radio waves, this sections' endnotes are all just above another very long entry. As such, every flip to the back of the book filled me with dread.

Reading Too Far in tandem with Infinite Jest has made the former feel like a quick read. But now it seems that doing so has also made the latter even more daunting.

The Woods Darken

Although it starts out full of whimsy, Too Far becomes something more fairly quickly. Within chapters 3 to 5, the tone changes from one of childhood adventurousness looking to be curbed by adult experience, to one of keen dread and insecurity.

Shapero shows that Robbie's parents feel that he's almost too much to handle between them. His father's studying for a doctorate while his mother works four days of the week leaves them feeling as if they aren't quite responsible enough for a child. And it's made known that at least Robbie's mother thinks that the parents of the girl he's playing in the woods with (Fristeen) are definitely too irresponsible. The second set of parents' drug use is made pretty obvious in these chapters, and both of their moral codes are called into question.

Certainly not the least of these incidents comes when Fristeen becomes uncomfortable with the fact that they've just shown each other their genitals, fearing that she's become like her mother (?) Grace. Although it has yet to come up, there's some foreshadowing of Fristeen's feeling this way further when she notices that the woman in the couple they stumble upon in the woods wanted to "be killed."

Shapero keeps the book's whimsy alive through these chapters, but it is put into stark contrast with the harder, more difficult to understand adult world that also occupies the book. That both worlds are seen through the eyes of children makes them both all the bolder.

Are Free Books Going Too Far?

When you get a book for free and out of the blue you expect certain things. Things like gratuitous spelling mistakes, grammar that limps along, and a plot that lumbers down cliche lane.

I had Rich Shapero's Too Far dropped onto my table while I was studying in the University of Victoria's Student Union Building. It was dropped by my request, since I couldn't say no to a free book, however questionable its contents might be. But, those contents are off to a good start.

In what I can only imagine is a story inspired by Bridge to Terabithia, the plot follows six-year-old Robbie and his adventures in the woods near his house. It sounds rather dull, but the first chapter introduces the conflict his free spirit brings him into with his parents, a girl his age whom his mother forbids him from being friends with, and some sort of forest entity made of trees that eats children and commands the mists and winds.

10 chapters remain, so we'll see how Shapero hopefully takes these elements and does something strange and wonderful with them.