Laura Occasionally Blogs

Harriet the Spy was my favorite book at ages eight through twelve inclusive, but I never read Louise Fitzhugh's follow-ups in the same universe... until now. I had been told they were disappointing, and I never happened to see them for sale, so I left it at that. They were recommended for me on Amazon, so I decided to give it a go.

They are disappointing, as Harriet sequels, since they're nothing at all like Harriet, and she's not the main character in either one; it's hard to get as excited about other kids, who are so much more subdued. I read a quote on a fanfic journal once that the characters we love are often the ones who love themselves, who you could picture saying to themselves (in their own words, unironically) "I'm awesome."* This is a big part of Harriet's charm, I think, why we love her even though she is often rude and sarcastic and rageful. When you're smart, lively, interested in everything, and think you're awesome, rudeness and sarcasm and rage can become oddly attractive qualities. (cf. Emma, Dr Rodney McKay.) Beth Ellen and Sport do have their moments, and are often funny in their own internal monologue, but in both books they are too pawnish, too pushed around. They accept things Harriet would never stand for, and it's not as much fun to be them.

Still, as books, minimizing the comparison to Harriet, are they decent?

The Long Secret In a way, The Long Secret is about the "I'm awesome" postulate; Beth Ellen Hansen, a minor character from HTS who is the main heroine, starts out quiet and shy and miserable and angsty but gradually becomes more outspoken. She stands up for having her way, and discovers what her way is. The triumphant final scene features her joking and snapping at Harriet as good as she gets. Still, it's not as much fun to spend time with Beth Ellen as it is with Harriet.

It's clear that Louise Fitzhugh is trying to mitigate this by going back and forth between Beth Ellen and Harriet POV. The problem is that she does this more or less without warning. I would have liked a little more systematic-ness, like switching POV between chapters or scenes. Sometimes it's not clear who we're in. The other problem is that, for all we have Harriet, she doesn't DO much. We don't get a lot of notebook entries or interesting action. Harriet is actually at her best when seen from Beth Ellen's perspective, and we see her as this weird unpredictable ball of energy.

The main plot of the story has Beth Ellen mortified and upset when her mother, the globetrotting rich gadabout Zeeney, breezes back into her life with vague ideas about raising her daughter. Beth Ellen hates this and just wants her to go away so she can go back to normal life with her grandmother. Harriet finds the whole situation fascinating. Along the way, they meet and spy on various colorful locals, in classic Louise Fitzhugh slightly-unpleasant-slice-of-life style, only largely without the mean, gossipy, insightful notebook commentary that made those parts of HTS enjoyable.

Oh, and there's a mystery plot. This is the weakest part of the book. People around town have been getting mean notes, tailored to their individual personalities and faults, which are based on mostly Biblical quotes. Harriet is going nuts trying to figure out who's doing it, and--SPOILERS, WARNING, SPOILERS FOR THE MYSTERY SOLUTION FOR WHICH THE TITLE MILDLY SPOILS YOU ALREADY--right at the very end of the book we find out it was Beth Ellen all along. IT WAS THE PERSON WHOSE POV WE WERE MOSTLY IN. In fact, we were in Beth Ellen's POV several times when Harriet was going on about the notes, so it's pretty ludicrous that we didn't get any hint about it.

Overall, this feels like a draft that could have evolved into one of two better books:

(1) Harriet POV. More notebook entries, more solo spying, more like a real sequel to HTS. Beth Ellen's self-actualization could be one of the main spy-subject storylines; Harriet would become interested in her because of her mother's visit, and we could see her evolve from a target of Harriet's spying to an ally and friend, equivalent to Pinky Whitehead at the beginning and more on the level of Janie or Sport by the end. Learning that Beth Ellen sent the notes would, as in the existing book, raise her level of respect for her, since it proves that Beth Ellen is a lot like Harriet: observant, interested in people, mean.

(2) Beth Ellen POV. This book would focus more on the self-actualization storyline, Beth Ellen's feelings about her mother, but the notes plot would also be tons better. We would know that Beth Ellen was sending the notes from the beginning--would see her doing it--and we would actually get the emotional reactions and thoughts about watching people receive the notes, and palling around with someone who is trying to solve the mystery, that are conspicuously absent in the current book. Sure, there would be no mystery, but I really think it would be more interesting to fully understand Beth Ellen's drive to do this and how she feels about watching it unfold.

Incidentally, a total Beth Ellen POV would have covered up the weirdness of having Harriet suddenly be friends with someone who, in HTS, was a very minor character. I know, I know, they're "summer friends", but that doesn't come across in Harriet's book at all. It would be both heartbreaking and awesome if Beth Ellen simply thought they were great friends and we knew from HTS that Harriet doesn't hardly think about her.

I know I'm always going on about limiting POVs and I know there are a lot of books which are well served by having multiples (Rainbow Boys worked, so do sweeping Victorian novels about everybody in a town, etc.) but I really think this book is much worse for having both. It's like it's a crutch to prevent LF from having to make any decisions about either character.

Sport Everybody says this book is worse than The Long Secret, although I couldn't imagine how that could be so since, in HTS, I love Sport and I don't care about Beth Ellen. And I did enjoy this one more while reading it for the first time--it's more of a traditional, plot-driven novel, not so much with the slice-of-life vignettes, and Sport's internal monologue is enjoyable and very true to his HTS character: slightly less witty and mean but more world-weary and random and the result is just as funny. But having finished it, I can see that it's actually a worse book.

For some odd reason, both Sport and The Long Secret are about uninterested, rich, dull mothers suddenly coming back into the lives of their unwilling offspring and dragging them around to boring grown-up parties and dressing them up and just generally treating them more like pets than people. Sport's mother, though, isn't just flighty and whimsical but actually villainous, only showing interest in Sport when he inherits the ludicrous sum of thirty million dollars from his grandfather.

For a book about a poor kid getting an insane inheritance, there really isn't much on Sport's feelings about the change. Granted, it's not like the money comes to him all at once--the capital is in trust until he's thirty-five, and his guardians are supposed to get an income until then--but from the first, Sport has no interest in the money. His "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude makes sense, but you would think you would see some spark of "think of the things I could do with that money" from somebody who's had to keep a hawklike watch over the family finances from a young age. I would have liked to see him come to realize that the things he wants in life are mostly free, rather than just knowing it from minute one. I also felt that the logic of the story required him to relinquish his claim to the money, but this also never happened. The book ends and he is just a millionaire. WTF.

Another subplot that was way too smooth was Sport's father's marriage to his girlfriend, Kate. Kate is perfect and Sport likes her right away. Kate overtly wants to relieve Sport of the burden of his usual father-caretaking duties, and while I can see him thinking "score" about giving up the cooking and cleaning, it seems odd that he feels no sense of protectiveness or jealousy about anything, even the bookkeeping. How does he know Kate will do it right? Nothing in his upbringing has led him to believe that any grown-up is competent. The sudden entry into his life of both his biological mother and a stepmother could be a good chance to have him confused about his loyalties, his priorities in life, and good vs bad meddling behavior, but no, his mother is just horrible and his stepmother is just great he knows it from the beginning.

Basically, Sport neither changes nor does anything in this story. Everything happens to him: he's made to hang out with his mother, he watches his dad get married, he's kidnapped, he's rescued. While I believe in Sport as a passive victim, I would have liked to see him at least start doing things at the end. Or change his mind about something, anything.

Still, LF's writing on a moment-by-moment level is of course good, and there are some fun scenes. We do get a few breath-of-fresh-air glimpses of Harriet, who is both maturing and becoming a stranger--but who still scribbles everything down in her notebook, which is kind of funny when you see it from Sport's POV, and don't know what the entries say. And I do like that Sport seems to care about Harriet even less than she cared about him (she planned to marry him one day, but he hardly thinks about her, and lists her second in the group of people he'll be leaving when he changes schools, after Pinky Whitehead). More fun but irrelevant kids-hanging-out scenes might have saved this book, distracting from the plot, but it's a plotty book with a plot that doesn't make sense. I trusted it was going somewhere while I was reading it but in retrospect it's like, what's the point?

Still, I think I might have liked it when I was the age of the target audience, since it features lots of exciting injustice, and "the point" wasn't as important to me then.

*note if you follow the link: I'm providing the reference because the books made me think of that discussion, but it turns out I've partially misremembered it. I do not necessarily endorse the views in the actual quote, which suggest that fictional and real women are less likely to have that I'm-awesome attitude than men or that this is necessary due to double-standardy audience perceptions of female vs. male characters. It's notable that although many commenters provided counterexamples, ie. Ivanova, as far as I read, nobody mentioned Harriet the Spy even a commenter named harriet_spy.