I think one of the finest forms of humor is whimsy. It’s also one of the toughest for me to define. It’s such a case of “I knows it when I sees it” but that’s a cop-out. I’m smart, I should be able to define it, or at least give examples.

In thinking about whimsy (and it’s also a cop-out to go to a dictionary so I’m skipping that as well ) I found myself thinking that the film “Harvey” and Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of the innocent and amazing Elwood P Dowd, friend and protector of the tall invisible rabbit, embodied whimsy. I might argue, but not very hard, that one reason I love “things that look like other things” is that I find them whimsical. I own wind-up sushi, and the most amazing fake vegetables, I’ve bought soap that looked like sushi and recently bought soap that looks like ice cream treats. Whimsy is often cute. All cute is not whimsical. Oh that it would be but there’s a fine line between cute and cloying, whimsical and twee. Real Musgrave’s pocket dragons are whimsical, in large part thanks to the artist’s amazing ability to do cute expressions that just skirt icky, but stay on the proper side of icky. I own an astonishing number of whimsical rubber stamps, most featuring hedgehogs. They are also borderline but they work for me. Whimsy can be goofy. Sandra Boynton embodies whimsy. Lots.

Why do I go off on this tangent when the topic is supposed to be “forgotten books”? Because my topic this week really is two books by Shirley Jackson. Yes, that Shirley Jackson. The genius who wrote WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, “The Lottery” and more. (I for the record was never all that creeped out by “The Lottery” for some reason – maybe I saw it coming and it’s more horror than it is spooky, and spooky scares me far more. WHALITC is far spookier and far scarier, I find.) Jackson wrote two books about raising a family, with husband, kids, dogs and cats that are so damn funny, so amazingly silly and often so full of whimsy it hurts. I’ve read each one of these books a minimum of a dozen times. Probably more.

The books are RAISING DEMONS and LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES. They are most definitely dated, (Jackson, after all, only lived until the age of 48, goddamit, dying in 1965). Married to a university professor (which put her in the “faculty wife” category, a role that fans like me find amusing – as did she on occasion) she raised 4 kids and the books she wrote were simply amazing.

While I’ve never used it as a test of friendship, savvy or awareness, one reason I knew that Cornelia Read and I were destined to be fast friends was her instant recognition of a missing blue blanket.

Both books are laugh-out-loud funny, whether because of Jackson’s ability to switch gears on the reader quickly to her wonderful talent for deadpan in her writing. (Little League mothers and their nonchalant sons, leaving three kids and a husband home alone for three days with 5 pages of instructions, all eaten by the dog) to the slightest incomprehensible – who did leave those flowers on the back porch? And how do you deal with a daughter who not only has an invisible friend but has one invisible mother with something like seven invisible daughters, all of whom you’re bound to sit on some day. Really now. Moving into a home that within hours, they’ve outgrown, in small towns where everyone does know your business could be horrible, but Jackson offers it as a hugely amusing giggle. While we know her as a novelist and author of amazing talent, the folks in town knew her as the mother of those kids over there, one of whom seems to be casting a spell, and one of whom seems to be named Mr. Beekman (Barry for a while. Eventually he settled into Barry, but he answered to “Beekman” for a long time.)

Ther danger in quoting from books like these is that you have to set the scene and it takes way too long, and describing the funny out of context just might leave you looking at me as if I were nuts. (I went through this trying to review Jasper Fforde when all I wanted to do was write “oh and then on page 32 there’s this thing….and oh oh yeah, page 67 is hysterical….”) Trying to explain why “one downstairs up” is so funny just loses in translation. There are situations which are firmly set in 50s America, and there are timeless situations, of jealousy and imagination, of learning to drive and hand-me-downs and kids with wild imaginations and absent-minded husbands.

I find myself far to often trying to explain that while no, I don’t find those books over there funny, that I do have a sense of humor and there are lots of things that I find funny. That always feels so pathetic, as if I’m holding onto someone’s sleeve and whining “I am SO funny. I am, I am!” but that my idea of funny isn’t Janet Evanovich, or pushy mothers, nosy mothers-in-law, Southern folks with funny names and weird manners, bratty teenagers and snobbism (which is how I see so many mysteries.) So I find myself often trying to hard to explain the funny.

But these books? Well, hell, they are flat out funny. I won’t say “of course you’ll agree with me” because I so hate that when someone pushes me into that position and I have to whine “but I don’t really, not in the least.” But in the twenty years or more since I discovered them, they remain two of my favorite books and two of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Endearingly goofy, whimsical and laugh out loud funny. Shirley Jackson did funny as well as she did spooky and that’s saying something.