Tuck Everlasting: Happy 40th!

Babbitt, N. 1975. TUCK EVERLASTING. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. ISBN 0374378487

I like to read when I fly, as some readers do. Flying back from a conference, I am usually thinking about my work or all I learned. But on this particular trip a few weeks ago, I needed a book to carry me off like the plane did - to get me dreaming and free.

Tuck Everlasting was just the right book for the part.

I can't remember when I first read the book. And now that it's celebrating its 40th anniversary, it was the perfect time to reread it.

The Tucks are a family of four: Tuck, Mae, Jesse, and Miles. In the woods long ago, they found a spring. They drank from it, not knowing that its gift -- or curse - was immortality. Realizing the destructive power it could have on others, they keep it to themselves, hiding the secret not to hoard but to save.

Winnie lives in the wood with her family, and she is looking for adventure. She explores farther out than she ever has -- and then she makes contact with the Tucks and she is never the same.

The yellow-suited stranger is also a part of it all. But for notorious and different reasons.

Before I took in the story, I became completely enveloped in the descriptions - especially of the wood: "But the wood had a sleeping, otherworld appearance that made you want to speak it in whispers" (Babbitt, p. 7).

And speaking of whispers, I read the rest of the book straight through -- without speaking so much as a whisper to anyone. It just seemed right. 

Soon, a few chapters in, I was a part of the Tucks' hypothetical-turned-reality: the idea of living forever when one didn't make the choice to do so.

The Tucks understand the ramifications of drinking the spring water (which they did unknowingly). This knowledge consumes their lives and directs their days. They understand what might happen if someone else finds the water. As a family, they reached the decisions together, but this doesn't make it easier.

I was a part of the Tucks' dilemma -- thinking about it, mulling it over, wondering about it all for myself.

And this is where the beauty of this book can be found. Babbitt's gift for bringing the reader into a story that compels critical thinking -- and does so with effortless text -- crafted with such skill that one must marvel. One. Must.

And a final word about that setting:

It serves as both backdrop and antagonist.  The wood  becomes a liability, and yet in the way that Babbitt describes every scene, it can also be considered an enchantment.

Readers are wrapped in the whole of this text with comforting arms. I nestled here, too -- an embrace most welcome during an uncomfortable plane ride at night in the darkest dark.

There is a poem on p. 123 that I will remember always --

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."


Happy 40th, Tuck Everlasting. Thanks for taking me farther than a plane ever could.