For the modern maker of picture books, it all goes back to Randolph Caldecott, the great Victorian illustrator who defined the form. Before 1878, when he published the first of his many fantasias on well-known nursery rhymes, there was no such thing as a children’s picture book—at least not in the sense that picture-book artists like Maurice Sendak now understand the term. There were, instead, children’s books with pictures, like the Alice books of Lewis Carroll and Sir John Tenniel, and albums of pictures with captions, like the alphabets and nonsense books of Edward Lear. Caldecott’s books were something altogether different. In Ride a Cock-Horse, The Queen of Hearts, and a dozen or so other titles, the young artist devised books that, in both word and picture, were a unified design from front cover to back. Every word, every picture in a Caldecott book contributes to the story being told and to the book’s overall aesthetic effect. In Caldecott, word and picture are, for the first time in children’s literature, equal partners in storytelling: here, according to Sendak, is a juxtaposition, a counterpoint, a syncopation of text and illustration that simply hadn’t happened before. “Words are left out,” Sendak elaborates in his foreword to The Caldecott Treasury (1978), “but the picture says it. Pictures are left out—but the word says it.” Caldecott is the source from which flowed not only the picture book but also, somewhat later, much of the comic strip and the sound cartoon.

Every word, every picture in a Caldecott book contributes to the story being told and to the book’s overall aesthetic effect.

The Caldecott-style picture book, says Sendak, is “a funny kind of juggling act,” and the balls that the artist must keep in the air, from one page spread to the next, are the text and the pictures. The pictures—well, the pictures are very concrete, and they tell their own story, which at some points is the story the text is telling and at other points the story the illustrator finds “between the lines.” That is why, Sendak says, the ideal picture-book text is ambiguous: “It has to let a number of meanings to shine through. It can’t be a heavyhanded text that says little Johnny goes from left to right, because then the illustrator doesn’t have any choice but to make little Johnny go from left to right. The text has to be . . . less obvious. You can have facts”—if your text is “Hey Diddle Diddle,” you’re stuck with a cat, a fiddle, a cow, a moon—“but the facts have to allow the artist to move the characters in any direction.” It is for precisely this sort of rich ambiguity that Caldecott did in fact do a version of “Hey Diddle Diddle,” and it is also why Sendak, following Caldecott’s example, has been carrying on his own lifelong love affair with Mother Goose.

When Sendak was in his thirties and just starting to make his way as an artist for children, he often turned to the nursery-rhyme books of Randolph Caldecott for inspiration. He raided Peter and Iona Opie’s definitive anthologies for lesser-known but evocative rhymes that he could elaborate upon in the manner of his master. His first Mother Goose book, the double-bill of Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water (1965), was less an homage to Caldecott than a modern-dress impersonation of him: the graphic style may have been Sendak’s own, but the humor, the pacing, the very manner of the visual storytelling was eerily that of the earlier artist. Then there was Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), a prose book with pictures that concluded with a series of full-page drawings—a sort of picture-book- within-a-book—that took the title nursery rhyme on a light-hearted romp. And also during this same mid-1960s period, Sendak produced the dummy for another Mother Goose book, but abandoned the project, perhaps because, in its similar pairing of two obscure nursery rhymes, it did not seem to the artist much of an advance on Hector.

“But the two verses stayed in my head,” Sendak reports, and now, some thirty years later, they have at last been interpreted, not separately, as in Hector, but as one continuous narrative. We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy is Sendak’s first picture book in over a decade. The text may again be Mother Goose, but the storytelling is anything but Caldecott. It isn’t exactly Sendak, either, at least not the Sendak who, in Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, went deep into the consciousness of his child protagonists and brought back the truth about children’s lives. Dumps is something new for Sendak, a book not so much about the interior world of childhood as about the adult world—the world of inefficient government, exploitative economics, and inequitable health care—and the horrors it can visit on the lives of the least powerful among us. It is, in short, an essay in present politics, and, like so much other political art—even, as in this case, political art created by an artist of genius—its very subtle aesthetic aims are at every turn undermined by a ham-fisted activist agenda.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Any discussion of Sendak’s book must begin by quoting the rhymes he has chosen to illustrate.

These two rhymes contain a handful of “facts”—kittens, baby, moon, Jack, Guy, bread, etc.—that Sendak, playing by Caldecott’s rules, is honor-bound to work with. The rhymes are, however, ideally ambiguous for the artist’s purposes, giving him near total freedom to supply setting, narrative, and meaning. And what is the story Sendak has found in these verses?

The book opens on a moonlit urban shantytown whose only human inhabitants are children.

The book opens on a moonlit urban shantytown whose only human inhabitants are children. The locale is unmistakably New York City—the Brooklyn Bridge looms in silhouette across two of the page spreads— but it’s a New York City of the mind, where Victorian-costumed street urchins coexist with the Empire State Building. Both of the title characters, like modern-day street kids, wear T-shirts with their names emblazoned on them, but Jack is otherwise dressed like Dickens’s Artful Dodger—overcoat, rakish red top hat and all—while Guy, in his floppy broad-billed cap, seems to be modeled on Jackie Coogan, Chaplin’s sidekick in The Kid. These two archetypal orphans and some dozen other homeless bit players all live out of trash cans, under corrugated cardboard, or in pup tents made of propped up bedsheets: “houses . . . built without walls.” Around their feet mill countless smiling kittens, which, it soon becomes apparent, are something more to these kids than mere pets. These cats are full and equal citizens of Shantytown: here is a peaceable kingdom of little lions and lambs.

Yet even before the first scene-setting double-page spread—the story is told in twenty-seven such spreads, all of them in full-color and bled to the edges—we are introduced, on the half-title page, to the book’s real hero, “the baby,” a bald-headed, brown-skinned toddler. He is neediness personified, and he announces his presence with a soundless, open-mouthed howl. He knows only one word, which he will utter frequently throughout the book, and that word is “Help.” When he approaches Jack and Guy, his palms up in supplication, Jack scowls and strongarms him. “Beat it!” he says.

Then all hell breaks loose. Two man-sized rats, close cousins of the Mouse King in Sendak’s version of Nutcracker, raid the shantytown, making off with the baby and a bagful of kittens. Jack and Guy, looking on in horror, have an instant change of heart: they give chase and, fists clenched, threaten violence. The rats, cowardly but cunning, challenge them to a game of bridge: “Let’s play for the kittens and the poor little kid!” But the game is rigged—“Diamonds are trumps”—and Jack and Guy are left hugging each other in grief as the rats haul off their winnings to St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage. The baby makes a break—but in vain. Not only is he recaptured, but his eye is blackened and his head is bitten by one of the rats.

At this, the moon—a benign, concerned presence who has been watching the action unfold from overhead—can no longer remain uninvolved. “In a fit,” he swoops down from the sky and picks up Jack and Guy in his mouth, taking them through a heaven full of angels and depositing them in a field of rye. There, in the very backyard of St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage, the boys find the baby and two of the stolen kittens. The baby kisses Jack on the mouth, which enrages him—“Come says Jack let’s knock him on the head!”—but Guy makes peace and soon the three children are approaching St. Paul’s to buy bread for themselves. Meanwhile, up in the sky and over a series of page spreads, the moon’s features become less human and more feline. Suddenly, the moon is in the field in the form of a giant white moon-cat, and Jack, Guy, and baby, riding the cat’s back, are storming the bakery. The cat kills the rats and so frees the kittens, who are stacked in narrow shelf-like bunks, no doubt awaiting their extinction in the bakery’s ovens. The cat again becomes the moon and takes the whole crew—Jack, Guy, baby, and kittens—for another tour of the heavens before returning them safely to a now sleeping shantytown.

In sketching the action of the book, I have told only part of Sendak’s story, “the story for children,” as it were. It’s a good one, both thrilling and wonderfully well told, and its message is one of hope and reassurance. Yes, Sendak whispers to his youngest readers, you are helpless. You are a kitten, and you are a baby. But if your helplessness fills you with despair, remember this: it is also your ace in the hole. It’s your helplessness that moves others who are stronger than you to protect you, to keep you out of harm’s way. There is Evil in the world: that’s a fact. It’s powerful, and you are prey to it. But there is also Good. Trust in your elders, and in the heavens. You may never find your way out of the world you were born into, you may forever be stuck “in the dumps,” but you’ll survive. And if you’re very lucky—as lucky as my baby—you may even love and be loved in return.

Unfortunately, Sendak here is unwilling simply to thrill and to reassure kids.

This, the Jack and Guy for children, is beautifully orchestrated, beautifully animated, wonderfully worked out in all its details. Unfortunately, Sendak here is unwilling simply to thrill and to reassure kids. Superimposed upon this Jack and Guy is another level of meaning, this one directed at Sendak’s adult readers. This Jack and Guy does not whisper its message, it shouts it, quite literally in banner headlines. The shantytown children wrap themselves in newspapers for warmth, newspapers with stories titled FAMINE IN THE WORLD, LEANER TIMES MEANER TIMES, BABIES STARVE, CHAOS IN THE SHELTERS. Some of the newspapers speak of AIDS, and a couple of these children may have the disease: they are bald, and their baldness is not that of babies but of six-year-olds in chemotherapy.

Most of the papers comment ironically on the “unreal” aspects of New York real estate: FINE HOMES, VERY SMART LIVING FROM $79,000, MORTGAGE MONEY AVAILABLE FROM $50,000 TO $500,000, no kids ALLOWED. The rats—the only discernible “adults” of the story—are not just cheats and thieves but, Sendak implies, somehow on the supply side of this real-estate madness. Before the rats play bridge with Jack and Guy, one of them builds a high-rise out of cards. When the boys are “trumped,” Sendak’s page spread is dominated by a looming gold-and-glass Trump Tower. At first I thought these rats were nothing more than Sendak’s sly nod in the direction of Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Samuel Whiskers, in which a pair of rats kidnap Tom Kitten with the aim of baking him in a roly-poly pudding. But Sendak’s rats are driven by something more than Potter’s naturalistic rattiness. These rats are clearly the embodiment of Reagan/ Bush-era greed: they deceive, they steal, and as good capitalist baker-rats, they “make bread.” Bread for them is a commodity, something to be exchanged for cash; for Jack and Guy and the baby, bread is the staff of life, something to be shared among themselves. When the boys liberate St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage, their first act is to put up a sign that reads FREE BREAD TODAY!

The bakery, as viewed from the field of rye, is an ominous structure. It looks like a gray concrete bunker, out of which rise two squared-off smokestacks evocative of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. One of the towers vomits a coil of heavy black smoke, and suddenly the Trade Center becomes something truly frightful: a crematorium. The kittens, shelved like so much lumber in their narrow bunks, evoke memories of what Allied Forces photographers found upon entering the Nazi death camps. Sendak’s bald message to his adult readers is grotesque: the rats among us— those who “make bread” but do not give it away, those who build tall buildings but don’t provide adequate housing for the needy, those who cheat and steal from the powerless to make themselves more powerful—are no better than Nazis. Their practices are genocidal, and their victims are the poor of the next generation.

But beyond all this, we adult readers are meant to realize, the rats are also us, members of the affluent, literate class, people who can afford twenty bucks for a picture book for our own kids but who never give a thought to the homeless, parentless kids of our cities. Sendak is appealing to the bleeding heart that beats deep within the chest of even the most rat-like among us, reminding us with a Brechtian stridency that all that we have—our square meals, our “fine homes,” our healthy bank accounts—we have only at the expense of have-nots. It is not insignificant that the newspaper that these children wrap themselves in is not just any newspaper: it is, quite explicitly, The New York Times. Neither is it insignificant that last September, when it came time to promote his new book, Sendak placed a tie-in cover not with The Horn Book or Ladybug, not even with Parents magazine or Parade, but with Tina Brown’s New Yorker. Now that’s laying down the poison where the rats can find it!

All of this would mean much less, of course, if We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy were not the work of our most accomplished picture-book artist but rather the product of, say, some cartoonist from the Raw school of sociopolitical commentary. We expect Nazi rats and Holocaust imagery from Art Spiegelman, Sue Coe, and those other shock-cartoonists who, insecure about working in a “lowly” medium best suited to Supermen and Mickey Mice, have been working hard and with a good deal of success to gain some respect, or at least some notoriety, for the comics. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Jack and Guy without the precedent of Maus, Spiegelman’s Holocaust epic in comic-book form, the great best seller of a couple of years ago and a special Pulitzer honoree. If Spiegelman can successfully haul a “kiddie” medium like the comic book into the adult arena, why can’t Sendak do the same for the picture book?

He can, of course, and who’s to say he shouldn’t?

He can, of course, and who’s to say he shouldn’t? But if he does so, he should at least be honest about what it is he’s attempting, both with himself and with his audience, and in Jack and Guy he hasn’t been. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a comic book, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything but an adult comic book: it isn’t Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories for one readership and Survival in Auschwitz for another. Sendak’s have-it-both-ways hybrid—on one level a children’s book, on another an illuminated op-ed piece—makes me uneasy. Although it speaks eloquently to its youngest readers, in the end it really isn’t for them. It’s a stealth book: it comes into the house through the nursery window but is intended for Mom and Dad’s nightstand.

Caldecott never condescended to kids by writing over their heads and haranguing their parents; Sendak never has until now. Perhaps it is time for Sendak to part company with the conventions of the child’s picture book and write his own Maus. But for my taste—and for the sake of his young audience—I hope that he doesn’t. I hope he returns to his Caldecott collection, relearns the lesson of the master, and rededicates himself to unadulterated children’s literature. What our children need are great artists who respect them, who address their concerns with humor and the utmost moral seriousness, and who don’t pander to the expectations of critics and contemporaries by taking on so-called adult themes. They need the unique artist who created Wild Things, Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, and who devised the brilliant children’s book at the heart of Jack and Guy. They don’t need yet another editorial cartoonist baiting greedy, self-centered, uncommitted grownups on their behalf.