Among the wonders of the best-selling parody Go the F**k to Sleep (Akashic Books, $14.95) is its breach of what might be the last frontier of four-letter freedom of expression.
The book is easy to appreciate on several levels, but what has hoisted it to the top of The Globe and Mail bestseller list and top spot on the New York Times Advice and Misc. bestseller list, squeezing out fad diets and folk spirituality, is surely the empathy young parents feel for Adam Mansbach, the beleaguered author (and a respected novelist), in his endless and ultimately pointless pleas to get his child to give in and fall asleep.
Richly illustrated by Ricardo Cortés with slumbering kittens, lambs, lion and tiger cubs and babies galore (as well as a few less innocent symbols, no less sumptuously drawn, like soaring owls, cactus plants and “giant pangolins of Madagascar”), the slim 32-page hardcover looks like the most inviting specimen of the genre it parodies, so much so that parents will want to keep it out of reach of children who are learning to sound out letters.
On the front cover, the F-word is obscured behind a full moon that hides the middle two letters, but everywhere else it is spelled in all its plain, blunt glory. All in all, that amounts to 15 times, one in the title and one in each of the 14 quatrains that make up the text. It is mainly used as an intensifier (as in the title) but also in idioms (“what the …” = who cares) and a couple of times as a gerund (once in the idiom “Stop … with me please, and sleep”). Never, obviously, as a transitive verb.
The profligate use underscores the narrator’s despair over his abject failure at persuading his child to sleep. The text makes that point more prosaically a dozen times (most prosaically in “My life is a failure”). Even the awkward rhymes make the point. The second line of every quatrain has to rhyme with “sleep,” the punch-word at the end of all of them. “The sparrow has silenced her cheep” is a line that could only pass muster for a parent at wit’s end, even in a children’s book. The same goes for the sloppy scansion: “All the kids from day care are in dreamland” is two syllables too long, and it is not the only one. But the voice behind the plea is authentic, F-words and all, and that is what really counts.
By now, use of the F-word for literary purposes is commonplace. The battle to print the F-word seems like ancient history. The first landmark goes back to 1951, to the novel From Here to Eternity by James Jones, when the author and his editors at Charles Scribner’s Sons had the temerity to print the F-word 108 times (albeit edited down from Jones’s original 258 uses) on the grounds that it represented the real speech of Jones’s characters, infantrymen waiting to be shipped to the battle front. The precedent that the book set became a social force. It led to court challenges in the immediate aftermath, but it is now pretty much taken for granted.
Go the F**k to Sleep represents a landmark, it seems to me, of a different order. Until now, the battle for freedom of four-letter expression has taken place mainly in cultural recesses. Not all of the recesses are necessarily haute couture, like pop music labelled for “Parental Guidance.” But most are. From Here to Eternity spawned 1960 trials in England, Canada and the United States to break the publication ban on D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint raised pornography into legitimate literature by virtue of Philip Roth’s exquisite writing and his device of cloaking the ins-and-outs as psychoanalytic confessions. By 2007, the movie, Young People Fucking played in art houses to small audiences, and excited as much public comment for the problems its title raised for advertisers as for anything else.
The audience for Go the F**k to Sleep inhabits no esoteric niche. It belongs to the solid mainstream. The genre that the book parodies is the daily fare of young parents, grandparents, nannies, day-care workers and other caregivers who find themselves, for better or worse, engaged in reading brightly coloured story books to preschoolers as inducements to sleep.
Unlike punk rock and art cinema, sales of the book spiked on Mother’s Day and again on Father’s Day. It is hard to argue with its success. Only the best children’s books have illustrations as gorgeous as this one. None of them has a text as childishly adult. Or as funny.
Jack Chambers writes about the social uses of language at www.chass.utoronto.ca.
