Book Review: Eyes in the Fishbowl

[osprey_archer]

There are a number of reasons why Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl is not one of her better known works, but for my money, the foremost reason is that title. I can’t be the only one who envisions a fishbowl full of eyeballs, and I suspect that the overlap between habitual Zilpha Keatley Snyder readers and people who want to read about bowls full of eyes is not very high.

But the title is misleading: it refers not to literal eyeballs, but an advertisement that the hero Dion sees, a picture of a fishbowl that seems to have a faint pair of eyes swimming in it - because there’s a photograph on the other side of the page of a girl with big dark eyes.

The advertisement comes to Dion’s attention because it’s for Alcott-Simpson’s, his favorite department store: an enormous, exquisite building that he has haunted since he first tried his luck as a shoeshine boy. Dion’s family is not quite destitute, but there’s no extra money for anything, and to him Alcott-Simpson’s has always represented a sort of fairyland of beauty and wealth. Never mind the head store clerk often tries to shoo him out on the assumption that this ragamuffin must be stealing.

A fancy department store is a very different kind of place than Bent Oaks Grove, or Libby’s Treehouse, or even the A-Z Antiques and Curio Shop, but it has something of the same kind of enchantment about it. One of Snyder’s great strengths is that she can bring places to life just as much as characters: they’re described so carefully - not exhaustively; but with such a good eye for the perfect telling detail that you feel like you’ve been there.

A department store may seem less inherently enchanting than an oak grove or a treehouse (although doubtless this is a matter of opinion), but Alcott-Simpson’s has a leg up on the aforementioned locations in that it is literally as well as figuratively enchanted: or perhaps haunted would be the better word, and not just by a hopeful shoeshine boy. Strange things have been happening there, and it’s beginning to scare the clientele away.

This has some extra poignancy because Eyes in the Fishbowl was written at the end of the great department store era. Most of them were driven out of business by shopping malls rather than paranormal activity, but there’s nonetheless an element of elegy about this book.

The secondary characters are not quite as well realized as the department store. Indeed, even Dion is somewhat fuzzy sometimes: he’s supposed to be rebelling against his father’s hippie values by embracing materialism (a novel take on teenage rebellion - a hot topic in 1968), but to me his love of Alcott-Simpson’s always felt aesthetic more than materialistic. It’s not like he’s walking through going “If I had a million dollars I would get that and that and THAT.” He loves the store because it’s beautiful; he doesn’t actually want to own the things in it.

This is actually an appealing character trait, and more fun to read about than “Dion: The Boy Obsessed with Mink-Lined Fishbowls,” but it does mean that his character arc doesn’t quite arc. But the sense of atmosphere and the mystery and the magic are strong enough that this doesn’t really matter - except in the sense that this also, probably, has done its part to make Eyes in the Fishbowl one of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s lesser-known books.

Comments

[kore]

I LOVED this book as a kid, lost it, and it took a couple decades to find it again (pre-internet). I had remembered it a bit differently -- I think I'd mashed it up with the same author's Changeling, heh.

[asakiyume]

The Changeling was a **marvelous** book.

[osprey_archer]

It's so weird how different books can meld together in one's head. There's a book I loved as a kid about a girl who walked into the fog and emerged magically in a different world, and I think it was Fog Magic... except that I remember the post-fog story quite differently from what actually happens in the book. So I think I may have gotten that part from a different book, but I can't for the life of me remember where.

[sartorias]

I hated this book as a teen. I haven't read it since. Probably should. I wonder what whizzed over my head.

[osprey_archer]

You might still hate it. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's deep enough that you're likely to reread it and go "Aha! That's what it's really about! It all makes sense now!"

[sartorias]

My memory of it was partly that it read like it was a couple of books ill put together, and partly it was sixties in the way I didn't like even when I was living it. But then I was a pretty clueless reader.

[asakiyume]

Is the story set in the present Snyder was writing in?

Department stores **do** have a magical vibe to them, a sense of many worlds coming together (because of the different types of thing being displayed in different locations. I used to have dreams about being in huge department stores with loads of toys or clothes or weird housewares. Sometimes they'd be a bit ominous in that I couldn't find my way out or couldn't find where I was supposed to meet someone, but they'd also be tantalizing. So I can understand the appeal of the setting! (And it's funny--department stores were killed by shopping malls, and yet we've already lived to see the demise of shopping malls at the hands of Amazon and big box stores like Walmart. I wonder what will come next...)

Does the picture of the girl with the eyes relate to the haunting? I'm guessing yes.

[osprey_archer]

Have shopping malls actually died? I think reports of their demise may, like Mark Twain's, have been greatly exaggerated; they may not be the behemoths they once were but they're still there.

But yes, I'm pretty sure the story is sent in the present when Snyder was writing - the talk about teenage rebellion in particular seems very topical for the sixties to me. And the picture of the girl does relate to the haunting.

[asakiyume]

I guess they haven't **quite** died yet--and it probably varies from US region to US region. We definitely still have and use shopping malls where I am. But they have a strained feeling to them, like when you can see the cords on someone's neck stand out when they're trying to smile and demonstrate confident ease.