The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill

I first made Jean Merrill’s acquaintance via a gleefully destructive elephant who learns the hard way that actions have consequences. THE ELEPHANT WHO LIKED TO SMASH SMALL CARS became one of our favorite picture books. Having a copy around was an excellent personality test for other parents—reflexive pearl-clutchers/non-kindred spirits eschewed chaotic noisy singalongs of “The Smashing Song.” I picked up THE PUSHCART WAR not realizing that it was by the one and same Jean Merrill. I was struck by the Tony Kushner blurb:

"The Pushcart War had a profound impact on me; when I was a kid I devoured it several times, and I've carried it deep inside me ever since. The book gave me a point of entrance—my first, I imagine—into the world of resistance to political and economic injustice and chicanery. It made opposition, even non-violent civil disobedience, seem fun and right and necessary and heroic, and something even someone as powerless as a kid could and should undertake."

Well now! I started reading it to my kid, not quite sure what we were getting into, and we tumbled into glory. It is such a smart, funny, and sharp book about the world that it has made almost everything I’ve read since, from novels to newspaper articles, feel drab and clumsy. Merrill conjures up a New York City of both the future and past, where a nefarious cabal of truck company owners are angling to own the streets. This starts by eliminating the pushcarts—but the pushcart peddlers unite (fractiously, because that is the truth of community organizing) and fight back, sparking a counterculture with its own slang (“don’t be a truck!”), codes, and folk heroes (all hail Frank the Flower). Along the way, Merrill pulls in the police, the media, celebrities, and the government and their various compromised and compromising relations to the situation at hand; it’s like The Wire, but with peashooters instead of guns and a dryer, wryer sense of humor.