From the Bookshelves: Edward Tulane and Talking About Love

I used to fear, whenever I explained “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” aloud, that its children’s book premise sounded trite. I hesitated when asked my favorite book, wanting to say something by Chekhov or Orwell, wondering whether I couldn’t find something grander to manifest my views on love. But I’ve realized that the power of the little tome lies in the skill and honesty with which Kate DiCamillo uses its genre to deliver insights in their purest, most urgent form rather than restrict the range and intensity of emotions. It’s a book about a china rabbit who gets lost and goes on a journey, but it’s also a book about love as pain and redemption. It’s a book about—and an inquiry into the heart of—each and every one of its readers.

Edward Tulane is a china rabbit given to Abilene Tulane by her grandmother Pellegrina. He wears custom-made clothing, has bendable joints, and even sits at the family dining table. He is also vain, self-absorbed, and entirely indifferent to Abilene’s unconditional love. During a family cruise to London, a couple of boys steal Edward and accidentally pitch him overboard. From the depths of the ocean, Edward journeys into the home of an old fisherman, Lawrence, who scoops him from the water; on the back of a railcar-hopping hobo, Bull, and his dog Lucy; and to the bedsides of Sarah Ruth and Bryce, impoverished young siblings with an alcoholic father.

Misfortunes tear Edward from each home, but he picks up a bit of each person and leaves a piece of himself at every stop. He learns that Lawrence and his wife Nellie lost a son to pneumonia. He serves as confidante to Bull’s friends, listening as they whisper the names of their left-behind loved ones. He watches from Sarah Ruth’s arms as she dies. He dances as a marionette in Memphis, where Bryce tries to scrape together money as a street performer. When Bryce cannot pay for a meal, the angry restaurant owner smashes Edward to pieces, and the rabbit reawakens to find that Bryce has managed to get him repaired at a high-end doll shop—at the cost of relinquishing Edward to the doll mender. By the time Edward makes it to the doll shop, he has lost Abilene and Lawrence and Nellie and Bull and Lucy and Sarah Ruth and Bryce. He has had his body literally shattered and repaired on account of those he loves. “I’m done with being loved…. I’m done with loving. It’s too painful,” he thinks. But the rabbit continues to let people into his heart—continues to love and lose, love and lose—until one day, Abilene finds him again and brings him home.

The book feels like the condensation of the kind of art that has haunted and influenced me throughout the years: art premised on the acknowledgment that there is everything to lose and that we must put ourselves in a position to lose it all, again and again and again. I love Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” singlemindedly taking on the ruins of the postwar South and sacrificing reputation, health, and peace of mind in order to restore her family land. I cheer on Riggan Thomson’s borderline suicidal desire for his play to succeed in “Birdman.” Even the non-narrative pieces I enjoy most echo this: the unrelenting, heart-baring torment of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8; or Gainsborough’s impeccable portraits, thousands of brushstrokes tautly and painstakingly controlled, their effort almost unbearable to consider.

“The kind of love I’m talking about, you don’t try and kill someone,” insists Edward Norton’s character in “Birdman,” quoting Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”—but the movie makes very clear that the kind of love that matters is the the kind of love where you just might, or even should, kill someone. I don’t think such statements stay with me because they accurately reflect how I live, but rather because they challenge how I live. They remind me to be honest about how much I’m really putting at stake for the things I care about; to keep my eye on the intensity and courage of love I admire in others; and to strive toward that same intensity and courage in myself. They remind me that despite how much we value dignity and pride, especially at a place like Harvard, there is something vitally humanizing about allowing oneself to be undignified, ugly, and desperate in love, like Riggan Thomson waddling through a sold-out Broadway house in his tighty-whities or Scarlett O’Hara making a dress out of her curtains so she can seduce Rhett Butler into giving her money for Tara’s restoration. Even in the face of imminent and devastating loss, these characters forge ahead in their pursuits in a way that we may often think of as bullheaded or downright foolish but cannot help but root for and aspire to anyway.

Without that determination, all the pride and self-worth in the world props up a mere china shell. “If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless,” another doll berates Edward. “You might as well leap from this shelf right now and let yourself shatter into a million pieces. Get it over with. Get it all over with right now.”

In the vast forest of great literature about the nuances of the human condition and the purpose of life, “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” will always be my unobscured beacon. Among all the confounding life philosophies and myopic goals I could lose myself in, it’s comforting to remember that my aspirations can be explained by something so unassuming as the meanderings of a china rabbit: Feel love for which you lose and pay and suffer. Feel love that strikes you as difficult and fraught. Love until it breaks you. Then love until someday, it finally puts you back together.