Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

1975

The perverse unfairness of the human lot is not lost upon children, and they begin ruminating about death from an early age. They grieve in anticipation of the death of their parents, they cry at the funerals of pets, they anguish over their own eventual demise. Depicting the inevitable cycle of life and death, children’s literature is replete with the tragic endings of beloved characters. Who has not shed tears at the death of Charlotte the spider or Beth in Little Women or Old Yeller?

With the angst associated with mortality as the norm, it is unsettling to read Tuck Everlasting which portrays a family condemned to immortality. Mae and Angus Tuck, along with their two sons and their horse, happened upon a forest spring 87 years earlier which, unbeknownst to them, conferred eternal life. The youngest son, now 104, is doomed to be a 17 year old teenager forever. The older son was abandoned by his wife after twenty years of marriage: fearing the hand of the devil, she took their two children with her. The family is forced to lead a lonely wandering life, unable to put down permanent roots or develop friendships. When ten year old Winnie, the protagonist, discovers their secret, she is faced with the choice of joining the Tucks in their immortality or accepting her three score and ten. It is Angus, the melancholy and gentle father, who ruminates upon the meaninglessness of life without change, growth, and death.

This is a thought provoking book of considerable sophistication and depth. Consider Angus’s theory, for example, that the spring was an isolated remnant of an alternative world plan, subsequently abandoned. Or the Tuck’s speculation about other souls who might have drunk from the spring, roaming the world in a similar suspended state of endless being, but with no marking to permit recognition by fellow immortals. These provocative ideas are presented alongside a plot line that includes a kidnapping, jail-break, and murder, enlivened further by a Mephistophelian yellow-suited huckster lurking in the woods. Natalie Babbitt is a gifted writer who weaves her narrative through startling descriptive prose: “the hard brown-yellow light” heralding impending rain or the way Winnie’s mother and grandmother sit in the darkened parlor, “their knees loose” in the oppressive heat. It is an unusual book with an unusual tone that defies easy characterization – part Southern gothic, part New England puritan, part Midwestern goodness.