His brothers Anthony and Nick find prizes in their cereal boxes he finds nothing but cereal. Throughout, he takes everything that happens to him as evidence of how bad his day is. Alexander goes to school, to the dentist, to his dad’s office, to the sneaker store. It does things that, in books for children, still feel rare, and worth celebrating. The book’s remarkable endurance makes sense to me. A few minutes later, our first reading was finished since then, we’ve read it again most nights. One night, a few weeks ago, he picked it out at bedtime. My wife did, though, and several months ago she suggestively placed her treasured copy on the shelf in our son’s room. I’ve always been aware of the book––not least because the string of adjectives in its title is a longtime staple of newspaper headlines (“Crypto’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week”)––but I can’t remember reading it as a child. The story, as many readers will have recognized by now, is Judith Viorst’s “ Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” currently celebrating its fiftieth year in print. “I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running . . .” Before the sentence ends, there’s one more clause, the famous one, in which the narrator draws from this pileup of woe the conclusion that feels, to him, inescapable: “I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”
“I went to sleep with gum in my mouth,” the book begins, and that would be a good opening sentence on its own–– Kafka with a splash of David Sedaris––but from there it careens forward, one clause tripping into the next, undisciplined by anything so polite as a comma.
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