The Yggyssey by Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Pinkwater's new book The Yggyssey is a loose sequel to his previous novel The Neddiad, and it's another lightly-plotted Pinkwaterian ramble through 1950s Los Angeles and contiguous alternate worlds. It's not one of his best books, but it is another book that only Pinkwater could have written, which is something. It's probably of most interest to middle-aged long-time Pinkwater fans such as myself; I'm unsure how actual current "young adults" will react to it.

I described The Neddiad as "a standard Pinkwater book: a young hero (we're not told that he's fat...but, then again, we're not told that he isn't, either) travels to interesting places, meets odd people who teach him new and exciting things, and saves the world in a quirky way without there having been a heck of a lot of tension along the way." Yggyssey is very similar; only the pronoun needs to be changed. The young person telling this particular story is Yggdrasil (Iggy) Birnbaum, who had a supporting role in Neddiad and the starring part in this book. She lives in the Hermione residential hotel in Hollywood in the '50s -- with her father, aged ex-cowboy movie star Captain Buffalo Birnbaum, and her younger and barely-mentioned mother -- where she's about equally amused and bothered by the large number of ghosts resident in the hotel.

Her friends are Neddie Wenthworthstein and Seamus Finn, the hero of the previous book and a boy who might just get a book of his own next. Those two boys and the other characters are a bit thin here; Iggy's voice is clear and distinctive, but everyone else comes across as a collection of quirky behavior without much center. The boys get dragged along first on Iggy's investigations of why so many of the ghosts from the Hermione have been disappearing, and then with her on a journey to Old New Hackensack, a city in an alternate world where the ghosts have gone for the Old New Supernatural Days festival. (As the subtitle explains: "How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All of the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There.")

Along the way, they have a series of adventures, in a minor picaresque manner, and eventually overthrow the not-all-that-evil overlord of the alternate world, who turns out to have an unexpected connection to Iggy. It's all pleasant and Pinkwaterianly oddball, but there isn't much purpose to it; these are just some things that Iggy and her friends did over the course of a couple of weeks rather than something with the shape of a real novel.

I'd called The Yggyssey "young adult" above, but it isn't, actually -- and, as I think about his work, Pinkwater rarely if ever really writes for what we now call the young adult audience. (Even his sublime Young Adult Novel is about middle-schoolers, for example.) Pinkwater's characters and audience are smart older kids: they haven't hit puberty yet, so they're still at the age when their obsessions and interests -- old movies, ghosts, shamanism, reading, dada, whatever -- define them, rather than their relationships with the alluring sex. He does write real novels -- even if The Iggyssey is a slight disappointment on that front -- but he writes them for tweens rather than teens. Pinkwater's last two books have not been his best, for whatever reason -- but the novel just before that, The Education of Robert Nifkin, is one of his best, so I'd recommend new Pinkwater readers to look for that book, or for one of the omnibuses of his best earlier novels, 5 Novels, and 4 Fantastic Novels.