[issybird]

More on the gender divide - I copied the following quote from Leo's ruminations on a Happiness Machine:

A machine, now, to help boys change from peach fuzz to briar bramble, girls from toadstool to nectarine.

Doug still regards them as toadstools, but this is his last summer for it.

The quote also encapsulates what the Happiness Machine is: Time. Dandelion Wine is simultaneously about stasis (it's summer now; it's always been summer) and about its ineluctable passage. The paradox is that it's the awareness of passing time that gives "now" its savor, down to the ice cream motif. There's the horror of Mrs. Tarot, imprisoned unchanging for centuries.

I liked this passage about holding time at bay:

It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and movers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.

There are echoes there of Fitzgerald's:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I really think this is a wonderful book, with more lights and shadows and depths than are evident on first glance, and the whole is much more than just a cobbling together of shorts.