Why children love Roald Dahl's stories -- and many adults don't

I have very fond memories of reading Dahl's books as a kid and/or having my mom read them to me. The New Yorker has an article on Dahl's work and his life in general. I learned that he is an anti-semite, which is disappointing. But I still admire the guy. It is a great article.

Excerpt:

In Dahl’s fiction, the bad characters aren’t just bad; they’re swing-kids-around-by-their-braids awful—a quality that some adult readers find unsubtle but many children find hilarious and satisfying. Even the good adult characters are often rash or easily cowed, whereas the kids in Dahl’s books are usually sensible, mature, and unflappable. (The kids make all the “good decisions,” as my nine-year-old son puts it.) And in Dahl’s stories the kinds of elaborate schemes that children are forever concocting—and that sensible adults are forever rejecting as impractical or dangerous—yield triumphant results. When the Giant Peach is attacked by sharks while floating across the ocean, James comes up with the idea of attaching loops of string to a flock of seagulls, in order to lift the peach into the air—and, voilà, that’s precisely what happens!

…

“I have very strong and almost profound views on how a child has to fight its way through life and grow up to the age of, let’s say, twelve,” Dahl told a BBC interviewer in 1988. “All their lives they’re being disciplined. When you’re born or when you’re one or two or three, you’re an uncivilized creature. And from that age, right up to twelve or fifteen, if you are going to become civilized and become a member of the community, you’re going to have to be disciplined. Severely. Stop eating with your fingers and spitting on the floor and swearing and anything else you want to mention. And who does this disciplining? It is two people. It’s the parents. . . . Although the child loves her mother and father, they are subconsciously the enemy. There’s a fine line, I think, between loving your parents deeply and resenting them.”

Most of Dahl’s young readers are presumably not mistreated, and yet they intuitively understand that the beatings and humiliations meted out to his young characters are metaphors for the powerlessness of being a child. And they appreciate that Dahl so nakedly takes their side.

Link to New Yorker article.