In a trick of reverse alchemy, Dave Eggers’s latest novel transmutes pure gold into base metal. He has taken the 300 words of Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak’s great picture book from 1963, and turned them into nearly 300 pages of trivial fiction. Sendak has been blessed in his previous collaborators. He has worked on children’s stories with the poet Randall Jarrell and operas with the composer Oliver Knussen. Eggers’s book, tied in with his and Spike Jonze’s new film version, is sadly misconceived in form and flawed in execution.

As the original book unfolds, it uses bigger pictures and fewer words until it reaches a ­climax on three ecstatic text-free double spreads where little Max, sent to bed by his mother, leads the Things in a “wild rumpus” as their king. The feelings shown are powerful, timeless and universal. I’ve read the book to ­generations of south London schoolchildren, and whether they come from Peckham or Pakistan they fill in the multiple meanings for themselves. Eggers ties the story into a ­contemporary brattish America, reducing its significance to the explicit and banal.

The narrative here is full of new and tedious detail. Max has a snotty teenage sister, an absent father with a glossy-mouthed girl-friend, school playmates and a set of officious or affable neighbours. His mom has a drippy live-in lover. We hear about Max’s games of soccer, his snow fights, his visits to “the bathroom”, his classroom experiences and his domestic quarrels in page after page unredeemed by excitement, novelty, imagination, surprise, ambiguity, grace or wit. More and more means less and less.

Sendak’s Max looks about four — the right age for tantrums, the right age to have a head a third the size of his body like the Wild Things and the right age to accept enchantment without reaching after fact and reason. Eggers’s Max seems about nine, ­riding his bike to school and studying science, and it doesn’t work. The point of view shifts clumsily between that of child and adult; when Max lands on the island he’s drawn by “the increasing volume of chaos” and the sound of “destruction, calamity”.

Then there’s the psychobabble. It’s not enough that Max has “conflicting thoughts”, or that his mom asks him to “be a force of stability, not chaos”. One of the Things says that she feels “like I’m constantly burdened by everyone’s issues” while another tells Max that “you’re really manipulative”. The unctuous piety is pervasive and unwelcome.

Eggers has some habitual stylistic tricks. There is studied repetition: “He was so tired, so very tired, so incredibly tired.” There are compilations of superlatives never fusing into a lucid image: “a magnificent and ­dizzyingly intricate wooden structure…utterly its own…complex and grand”. Most dismal are the pseudo-poetic interludes: “The air and moon together sang a furious and wonderful song… Let us drink the blood of the earth and gargle it with great aplomb!”

Sendak called his creations Things because then they could be anything readers wanted. Eggers calls them a “group of beasts” or “these lumbering animals”, telling rather than showing, diminishing their appeal and our interest. Adult irony is replaced by adolescent goofiness, subtle suggestion by clunky parallelism, endless wonder by cut-price Freud. Anyone who can write “the giant creatures were infant-like, almost cute, and at the same time, pathetic, tragic” has betrayed his readers, changing rough magic into wordy emptiness.

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers
Hamish Hamilton £14.99 pp288

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