Authors: Paula Fox
Maurice’s Room
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX
Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award
Winner of the
Paris Review's
Hadada Award
“The greatest writer of her generation.” âJonathan Franzen
“One of America's most talented writers.”
âPublishers Weekly
“Consistently excellent.”
âThe New York Times
“Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships ⦠and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.”
âSchool Library Journal
“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.⦠Fox's brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” âPeter S. Prescott,
Newsweek
“Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” â
The New Yorker
“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina ⦠Fox's prose hurts.” âWalter Kirn,
New York
magazine
“Fox's achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” âMargaret and Michael Rustin
“Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” âSarah Churchwell
“There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.⦠[Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by
homage
or self-indulgence.” âRandal Churb,
The Boston Review
“Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” âFiona Maazel,
BOMB
Maurice's Room
“Excellent dialogue ⦠Lively pace and the familiar subject blend beautifully in this exceptionally fine tale.”
âThe New York Times Book Review
“Here is that rare thingâa new character arriving to join the Club of Rare Characters.⦠Maurice, with an assist from his dedicated friend Jacob, is a collector.⦠Don't you hesitate a moment to collect
Maurice's Room
!”
âPublishers Weekly
“Very straightforward, very easy to read, and very funny. Eight year old boys will be able to make a place for itâunder their beds, or wherever it is they keep their favorite books.”
âKirkus Reviews
“[Maurice] is enchantingly real, his family is real, and his friend Jacob ⦠is real. They are all charming, and their intended audience of middle-grades readers will be augmented by secret, older admirers.”
âSaturday Review
Maurice's Room
Paula Fox
FOR GABE
CONTENTS
2. “GET EVERYTHING OFF THE FLOOR”
1. THE COLLECTION
Maurice's room measured six long steps in one direction and five in the other. The distance from the floor to the ceiling was three times higher than Maurice. There was one window through which Maurice could see several other windows as well as a piece of the sky. From the middle of the ceiling dangled a long string, the kind used to tie up packages of laundry. Attached to the end of the string was a dried octopus. It was the newest addition to Maurice's collection. When his mother or father walked into his roomâwhich wasn't oftenâthe octopus swung back and forth a little in the draught.
Maurice had used a ladder to climb up high enough to tack the string to the ceiling. The ladder was still leaning against the wall. Instead of returning it to Mr. Klenk, the janitor of his building, from whom he had borrowed it, Maurice was using the steps for shelves. Even though Maurice's father, Mr. Henry, had put up a dozen shelves around the room for all of Maurice's things, there still weren't enough.
Maurice knew how to walk around his room without stepping on anything, and so did his friend Jacob. But no one else did.
As his mother and father often said to visitors, it was astonishing how much junk a person could find in one city block. His mother said Maurice kept their block clean because he brought up everything from the street to his room. His father said Maurice ought to get a salary from the Department of Sanitation because of all the work he was doing in cleaning up the city. At least once a month Mr. and Mrs. Henry talked about moving to the country. It would be better for Maurice, they said. But then they would decide to wait a little longer.
Some visitors said that collections like Maurice's showed that a child would become a great scientist. Many great scientists had collected junk when they were eight years old. Other visitors said Maurice would outgrow his collection and become interested in other things, such as money or armies. Some suggested to the Henrys that they ought to buy Maurice a dog, or send him to music school so that his time might be spent more usefully.
In his room Maurice had a bottle full of dead beetles, a powdery drift of white moths in a cup without a handle, a squirrel hide tacked to a board, a snakeskin on a wire hanger, a raccoon tail, a glass of shrimp eggs, a plate of mealy worms, a box of turtle food.
There were things with which to make other things, such as nails of different sizes, screws, wire, butterfly bolts, scraps of wood, sockets, filaments from electric-light bulbs, cardboard from grocery boxes, two orange crates, a handsaw and a hammer. On the top of a chest of drawers Maurice kept stones and pebbles, dried tar balls, fragments of brick, pieces of colored bottle glass that had been worn smooth, and gray rocks that glistened with mica.
On his window sill there was a heap of dried moss next to a turtle bowl in which several salamanders lived half hidden by mud and wet grass. On the same sill he kept some plants from the five-and-ten-cent store. They looked dead. Now and then a cactus would put out a new shoot.
In another bowl on a table covered with yellow oilcloth were four painted turtles that were getting quite soft in the shell, and in a corner, in a square fish bowl with a chicken-wire roof, lived a garter snake and a lizard. An old hamster in his cage slept or filled his pouches with dried carrots or ran on his wheel. The wheel, which needed an oiling, screeched all night, the time the hamster preferred for exercise. But the noise didn't keep Maurice awake, only his parents. In a pickle jar, a garden spider sat in a forked twig, her egg sack just below her. Maurice also had a bird. It was a robin, blind in one eye and unable to find food for itself.
On the floor were coffee cans with things in them; an eggbeater with a missing gear, a pile of dead starfish, cigar boxes, clockworks, hinges, and a very large grater with sharp dents on all four of its sides. The grater was orange with rust, and it stood in the middle of the room beneath the octopus. You would have to use a magnifying glass to see all the other things Maurice had found.
His bed had two blankets and a pillow without a pillowcase. Sometimes a small goose feather pricked its way through the ticking, and Maurice would put it away in an envelope. He had used two pillowcases for his collecting expeditions, and after that his mother wouldn't give him any more.
There was one tidy corner in Maurice's room. It was where he had pushed his Christmas toys. They were a month old now, and the dust covered them evenly. They were like furniture or bathroom fixtures. Maurice felt there wasn't much to be done with them.
2. “GET EVERVITHING OFF THE FLOOR”
It was the end of January, and Maurice had just come home from school. He put his books on his bed and went to see what the snake was doing. It was lying on its rock. The lizard was watching it. The robin was so still it looked stuffed. But it cocked its head when Maurice whistled at it. The hamster was hiding bits of carrot in the sawdust at the bottom of its cage. The salamanders had buried themselves in the mud. Maurice was arranging little piles of food for his animals when he heard his uncle's voice from down the hall.
“Lily,” his uncle was saying to his mother, “you ought to dynamite that room!”
“There must be another way,” his mother said.
“You'd better give it up,” said his uncle. “Maurice will never clean it.”
“If we lived in the country, it would be different,” said his mother.
“Perhaps,” said his uncle.
Maurice took two walnuts from his pocket and cracked them together. His mother came to the door.
“Get everything off the floor,” she said in a low, even voice as though she were counting moving freight cars.
“Where will I put things?” asked Maurice.
“I don't care,” she said. “But clear the floor! Or else I'll bring in the broom, the dustpan, and a very large box. And that will be that!”