Before proceeding with this story, we strongly advise that you perform the following small but essential tasks: Tap your foot on the floor.
Touch the nearest wall.
With the thumb and index finger of your left hand, reach over and gently pinch a tiny area of skin on your right forearm.
What you now must realize-should you be of reasonable intelligence and serviceable imagination, and should you find yourself within the immediate vicinity of a book called “Chasing Vermeer”-is that the gestures you just performed prove absolutely nothing.
The floor may not actually be there. The wall? Perhaps the stuff of pure conjecture.
You? Ditto.
In fact, if Blue Balliett has her way, most of the known verities of the universe-floors, walls, the stultifying notion that grownups have all the answers-will be revealed as the flimsy speculations they are. Children will be empowered to discover all sorts of splendid new truths. The world will drop its silly pretense of solidity and share the gorgeous secret that everything is in flux, that anything can change in an instant.
“I like things that make your mind go, ‘Ooooo,’ ” says Balliett, offering a low, eerie sound that rhymes with “few” and that is routinely produced by ghosts in abandoned mansions at the edge of town. “I like that feeling of lemon juice on the mind.”
Balliett is the woman who wrote “Chasing Vermeer,” (Scholastic, $16.95), this year’s winner of the Chicago Tribune Young Adult Book Prize. Established in 2002, the annual $5,000 prize recognizes work that is especially relevant to adolescents-those between 12 and 18-and speaks to their role and significance in society.
“Chasing Vermeer” is aimed at readers perhaps 10 to 14 years old, but would be enjoyable for anybody who likes a great yarn. It is an adventure story, a mystery, a puzzle, a lesson in art history, a riddle, a fable, a satisfying tale of friendship and community, an allegory about truth and doubt. It features heinous crimes and harrowing escapes.
And it has these really cool things called pentominoes that help both real mathematicians and regular kids do their work (see accompanying story). “I love questions that don’t have answers,” says Balliett. “What makes something valuable? What makes something beautiful?”
Some questions, of course, do have answers. If you ask, “Who is Blue Balliett?” part of the answer is: a thin, 49-year-old woman with pale blue-gray eyes and long, slender expressive fingers and a sort of fluting, lilting laugh that sounds the way soda pop probably feels after the can is gently shaken and then opened. She moves with a serene and uncommon grace-although it seems that, just below the surface of all that serenity, the laugh is just waiting to escape.
She lives with her family in Hyde Park a few blocks from the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where she taught 3rd grade, off and on, for a dozen years. She retired in 2003 to write full-time.
To create “Chasing Vermeer,” Balliett gathered up everything she knew as a teacher, a parent, an art lover, a citizen of the world, a seeker of unusual truths. The story features Calder and Petra, two “hybrid kids” or “club sandwiches of culture,” as the narrator calls them, who are 6th-grade students at the Lab School. Petra’s mother is from the Middle East and her father is from northern Europe. Calder’s father is from India and his mother is from Canada.
“These are real kids,” Balliett says. “They’re combinations of kids I taught, with a little bit of my own kids sprinkled in.”
Petra and Calder aren’t friends at first-they simply don’t know each other very well-but in the course of “Chasing Vermeer,” they forge a great partnership that helps solve a dastardly crime and restores to the world its missing sense of wonder.
And while the book is filled with odd circumstances and eccentric characters and fabulous coincidences, it has, traveling up its back, a spine of steely reality. That is, there’s nary a wand or a broomstick in sight. The people act and sound like people you see and hear every day, and the setting-the sidewalks of Hyde Park surrounding the U. of C.-includes some actual places, such as Powell’s bookstore and Harper Avenue and the Lab School itself, which was founded in 1896 by U. of C. Professor John Dewey as an institution in which kids could learn by doing.
“I really wanted everything in the book to be real, or as close to real as I could get it,” says Balliett, who is already at work on a sequel. “I found that kids do best when they have real-world situations and when they have questions that haven’t yet been figured out by adults.”
Hold on. If “Chasing Vermeer” is about real stuff, then how can it also be about a world that is encircled by veils of mystery and enchantment, by the constant possibility that everything we think we know may be wrong? If there is no Harry Potter or other assorted wizards, how can there be magic?
That’s the neat trick about Balliett’s book. It’s about the actual magic of the world, which is summoned not by cackling over cauldrons but by closely observing what’s really there: friends, colors, numbers, autumn leaves, good books and brains in high gear.
“It’s asking the question, ‘Why can’t that happen?’ ” Balliett says. “Maybe children know something the rest of us have forgotten. We get stuck in conventional perceptions. People see what they want to see. But kids still have an open mind. This book is about the power of wide-open questioning that kids do.”
Balliett’s husband, Bill Klein, puts it this way: “There are so many children’s books out there about magical kingdoms and kids of old. These are contemporary kids living in a contemporary city.”
Adds Jean Feiwel, editor in chief of Scholastic Press, “In an era where fantasy is the name of the game [in children’s books], this has some very different elements.”
Balliett didn’t care that she was bucking trends in the publishing industry by steering clear of spells and charms and sticking with lunchboxes and homework. Her only concern, she says, were the ideas to which she is devoted as a teacher. And the convictions she holds about kids’ abilities and interests and imaginations.
“I wasn’t sure if it would have any slot in the market. I wasn’t sure if anybody would want to read this book,” Balliett admits. “I just did what I wanted to do and what felt right. So all the ingredients in the book are real-the characters, the neighborhood, the pentominoes, the classroom.”
As the novel opens, strange things are happening in Hyde Park. Mysterious letters are delivered to seemingly random people. Even more frightening, just as Petra and Calder and their classmates embark on a school project about art-their teacher, Ms. Hussey, asks them to think about art in a special new way-they read in the newspaper that a priceless painting by Johannes Vermeer has been stolen.
These events fizz and snap all around Calder and Petra, echoing the action that’s going on in their own heads. For Calder, who adores patterns and codes, the heavy-duty thinking is helped along by his set of pentominoes. For Petra, thinking means analyzing how things work, especially art, and especially the paintings of Vermeer, the Dutch artist who died some 3 centuries ago but whose canvases still enrapture viewers.
“This was art that was an adventure,” Petra realizes, because it “let her into another world. It made familiar stuff seem mysterious. It sent her back to her life feeling a little different, at least for a few minutes.”
Both kids are inspired by Ms. Hussey’s No. 1 rule: “Listen to your own thinking.” It’s a rule that readers of “Chasing Vermeer” would be well-advised to follow as they work through the book’s scintillating puzzles.
No one should be startled that Balliett wrote a book with art at its core. She was an art history major at Brown University, and both her parents, who divorced when she was 10, are writers. Her father, Whitney Balliett, was the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker and author of several exquisite books about music. His definition of jazz has never been surpassed; it is, he wrote, “the sound of surprise.” Balliett’s mother, Elizabeth Platt, is a nonfiction author who wrote a book about day care.
“Both of my parents were always giving me things to read,” Balliett recalls fondly. “They were both readers with gigantic libraries and we were always talking about books and ideas, about word use and language.”
She grew up in Manhattan, where she and her older sister and two younger brothers lived “near this wonderful handful of museums,” including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Art Museum. Thus for her, museums weren’t formal, intimidating palaces that one approached with a reverent hush dressed in fancy clothes, but friendly places to hang out and think and dream in. “I loved it. Nobody dragged me there. I got to go there on my own. If I needed some peace and quiet as a teenager, I’d go and walk around a museum and think.”
When it came time for college, she selected Brown because Brown didn’t say, “Do this” or “Don’t do that.” It was the first Ivy League school that allowed students to design their own courses of study. “By the time I finished high school,” she says, “I wanted to learn my own way. Brown gave me freedom, and it felt good.”
After college, Balliett–who had decided to follow the family business and become a writer–decamped for Nantucket Island, famous launching pad for 19th Century whaling ships, which lay off the coast of Massachusetts. “I went out and did all kinds of jobs, like grill cook and waitress,” Balliett says, adding her high-pitched, slightly ethereal-sounding laugh. “I didn’t want to go to a 9-to-5 job.” At night, she wrote poetry.
One day she answered a newspaper ad for a car. The guy trying to unload his Volkswagen was Klein, director of planning for the town. “No sooner had she taken the title,” he recalls sheepishly, “than the car broke down.”
The marriage, fortunately, has proven to be a bit more durable. After 13 years on Nantucket, Balliett and Klein–now the parents of three children, two girls and a boy–moved to Chicago in 1991, when Klein took a job as director of research for the American Planning Association. “We had a great time on Nantucket,” Balliett says, “but we just felt the island was isolated and too small.”
They settled in Hyde Park, and Balliett began teaching 3rd grade at the Lab School, where her children were enrolled. She began something else as well: her first novel.
“She’s always been passionate about writing,” says Klein. “But like many women in their 20s and 30s, there were always diversions–kids and jobs and what not. It was frustrating for her because writing was something she really, really wanted to do.”
Back in Nantucket, Balliett had published two collections of ghost stories, but a novel–a novel was utterly different. It was the pure, intense product of her own imagination, an imagination kindled by all kinds of fuels: kids, words, art and by a funky book she had plucked from a library’s discard pile back in her college days.
It was called “Lo!” (1931) and it was by a man named Charles Fort, an eccentric, scribbling New Yorker who died in 1937. And because everything in the world eventually connects with everything else, “Lo!”–which explores the secret springs of coincidences that keep those connections in tune–naturally turns up in “Chasing Vermeer” just in time to inspire Petra and Calder in their bold adventures.
Balliett’s decision to write a novel wasn’t quite as dreamy as it sounds. There was a distinctly utilitarian side to her labors, Balliett says: She was, in effect, creating her own textbook.
Each year, she asked the class to pick a project. “I tried to set up situations that followed their interests as a group.” One year the kids came up with a new design for a McDonald’s restaurant; another year, they tracked the space shuttle. Another time, they studied Native Americans.
“One year,” she remembers, “I had a group of kids who were very interested in art. They were also interested in mysteries. During that year, we did some of the investigations that turn up in ‘Chasing Vermeer.’ Like trying to figure out what art was.”
But Balliett, who likes to read aloud to her classes, became frustrated. “I couldn’t find enough to read aloud to them that was about children and about intelligent, real-world examinations of art. I could find boiled-down versions of adult books that asked, ‘OK, what do you see in this picture?’ But not art within a fictional setting.”
The only book Balliett could come up with was a favorite from her childhood, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the Newberry Award-winning 1967 novel by E.L. Konigsburg about a sister and brother from Connecticut who run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, they try to solve the mystery of a statue that may have been created by Michelangelo.
“Of course I read it to them and they said, ‘OK, what’s next?’ So I thought, well, let’s write one of our own.”
She bought a laptop, settling down to work after school and on weekends in the one spot in the house where she could be guaranteed complete privacy, because it was the place most rational people avoid at all costs: the laundry room.
Everybody knows the terrible, diabolical fate that can befall you in a laundry room: You may be asked to do laundry. “Once I had the book started,” Balliett recalls, “I believe I stopped folding laundry entirely.”
Some 2 years ago, Balliett signed with an agent who submitted a draft of the novel to several publishers. There ensued a fierce scramble for the book among five firms. “I was shocked!” she says. “But even after I signed with Scholastic, there were three more drafts. It was a very complicated book to do.”
That’s because it isn’t just a story with beginning, middle and end. “Chasing Vermeer” also has puzzles within puzzles, a secret code in which Calder’s friend Tommy writes to him (and for which readers are provided the key, but you still have to do the decoding work), and crucial clues in the book’s illustrations by Brett Helquist.
Helquist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, is perhaps most famous for creating the illustrations for “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” the hilariously dour children’s books by Lemony Snicket. “Chasing Vermeer,” Helquist says, grabbed him right away.
“There aren’t many good books for children about art. Art history can be so stuffy and boring sometimes, and it seems to intimidate a lot of people,” he says. “This gives a child a new way of thinking about art. What you think about art is just as important as what the experts think.”
Helquist, whose drafting table is surrounded by a toy collection and bookshelves filled with comic books, says it took him about two years to wind up the illustrations for “Chasing Vermeer.” He spent a few days in Chicago, visiting the scenes of Balliett’s novel, before sitting down to sketch Petra-who describes herself as “shaped like a lima bean”-and Calder, who privately fears that he is an “oddball.”
The pictures took longer than they would have otherwise, Helquist explains, because of the code Balliett embedded in them. “There’s a lot going on in the book that isn’t in the text,” he says. “To illustrate between the lines-that’s what I always shoot for.”
Pictures, in other words, have their own special language. Balliett agrees, especially since it was a certain set of pictures-the work of the mysterious, enthralling Vermeer-that got her thinking in the first place about a novel that would mix kids and art and ideas.
In 1995, Balliett and her husband joined tens of thousands of other Americans who strolled past the historic Vermeer exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Twenty-one of the 35 works commonly ascribed to Vermeer were on display, an unprecedented assemblage. Works such as “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” and “The Geographer” were astonishingly luminous, Balliett recalls.
She knew a lot about Vermeer from her art history studies at Brown, but nothing had quite prepared her for the emotional impact of actually seeing a Vermeer painting–of feeling those colors hum. Of seeing that light shimmer. Of absorbing those rich, sumptuous details.
And of wondering, “Huh?”
There was, Balliett insists, “something wrong.” Something that nagged at her. “I was struck by a very strong feeling that some of his very early works and very late works were so different in execution and in treatment of light. I thought, ‘What is this?’ “
Balliett was officially hooked by the Vermeer mystique–by all that we don’t know about the Dutch painter, who died penniless at 43 leaving 15 children, a frantic wife and an enormous number of questions about his working methods.
“Only two of his paintings were signed in his lifetime, so far as we know,” Balliett notes. “We have people all over the world deciding, ‘This is a Vermeer.’ We have no proof. The man left nothing behind. We don’t know how he died. We don’t know if he had students. We don’t know a thing about him.
“So I thought, ‘OK, this is the perfect vehicle for kids to do an art project that clearly nobody has all the answers about.’ “
Indeed, if you ask Arthur Wheelock, the renowned Vermeer scholar and a National Gallery curator who compiled the 1995 show, how many Vermeers the museum owns, he says, “Three and a half.”
Three and a half?
“In ‘Girl With a Flute,’ some of the elements don’t seem to be totally Vermeer,” explains Wheelock, author of numerous books about the artist. “It was started by Vermeer, but it must have remained in his studio and been worked up by somebody after his death. But the essence is Vermeer.”
So what is it about those elegant, highly stylized domestic scenes of 3 centuries ago that leave audiences agog, and that inspired Balliett and other authors to write novels about the baffling man with the brush?
“It’s the sense of the quiet moment,” Wheelock muses. “These figures have so much serenity in the midst of frenzy.”
That’s close to what the character Petra thinks when she dreams about a Vermeer painting that turns out to be “The Lady Writing”: “This was a calm, deliberate world, a world where dreams are real and each syllable held the light like a pearl.”
Next thing you know, Petra’s on her way to yet another energizing truth: “There is much more to be uncovered about the world than most people think.”
And much more to be uncovered about Vermeer, which is why Balliett wasn’t perturbed when other Vermeer-inspired books appeared before hers: “The Music Lesson” (Crown, 1998) by Katharine Weber; “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” (MacMurray & Beck, 1999) by Susan Vreeland; and “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (Turtleback, 2001) by Tracy Chevalier. The first two are about stolen Vermeers; the last, which was turned into an exquisite film last year, is about a young servant who may have posed for the artist.
Yet those novels are for adults and Balliett’s is for kids–and she never considered any other audience, she says.
“Writing ‘Chasing Vermeer’ was such a joy because I got to get into it everything I believe as a teacher,” Balliett declares. “I feel that so much of what’s going on for kids now is so sad.” The constant, onerous pressure of standardized testing is squeezing the joy out of many classrooms, she believes. “You end up with teachers just trying to get kids through tests.”
Balliett’s novel would drive a standardized-test enthusiast batty. “It’s about another way of doing things–about developing critical thinking and imagination,” she says with relish. “Treating kids’ brainpower with more respect.”
That respect lives in the very air at the Lab School, where Balliett is recalled as a terrific teacher. “She’s very knowledgeable about what engages kids in learning,” says Beverly Biggs, principal of Lab’s lower school for the past 10 years. “She’s an incredibly creative person herself and can integrate the children’s imagination so it can seem quite seamless.”
And she bears more than a passing resemblance to Ms. Hussey, the marvelous, slightly daffy teacher of Petra and Calder in “Chasing Vermeer,” Biggs notes.
Bob Strang, who retired from the Lab School in 1998 after a 35-year teaching career, including four years of team-teaching with Balliett, praises her “extraordinary imagination” and “willingness to accept children where they are, instead of imposing values on them.” It was Strang who introduced Balliett to pentominoes, the objects that end up providing crime-solving clues in the book.
Balliett’s ideas about teaching work well at the Lab School, where minds are stoked like locomotives. As its founder, Dewey, wrote in 1894: “There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all the time; a school where some actual literal & constructive activity shall be the centre & source of the whole thing . . . . “
But what about kids who aren’t fortunate enough to go to such a school? Or who don’t come from homes in which education is valued? What does “Chasing Vermeer” say to them?
The same things it murmurs to Calder and Petra, Balliett says: Work hard. Trust your brain. Believe in the questions. “I feel so strongly about kids growing up believing in their abilities, listening to their own voices. That’s what we need to give kids who are going to be inheriting this complicated, torn-up world.
“Kids–all kids–come alive and awake when you give them a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Kids need a reason to learn, to be gathering information. I think people forget that kids need those reasons.”
And they forget that everything is connected in some way, that a sort of golden contingency links people and ideas in a great circle of wonder.
Such everyday magic could be the reason, moreover, that someone named Blue–her real name is Elizabeth, but her mother called her Blue from the moment Balliett was born, she says, “for the color of the sky”–wrote a book about Vermeer.
The blue headband is the most fetching visual element in Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” perhaps his most familiar work. It’s almost as if the painting waited, biding its time, until along came the perfect interpreter to reveal its magic to quick young minds, and her name happened to be . . . Blue.
“You have to be comfortable with surprises,” says Balliett, whose smile contains just the faintest hint of mischief. “I like flying at the edge of the moment.”
– – –
“On late afternoons in the fall, the sun came through the leaded glass window in the Pillays’ living room and threw rainbows and wavery rhombi and polygons on the floor, the walls, the backs of chairs and sofas. This parade of soft color traveled slowly up one side of the room and vanished in the corner of the ceiling. Grandma Rajana always swore that sitting in geometry helped the brain. ” — Excerpt from “Chasing Vermeer”
“What was art, anyway? The more Petra thought about it, the stranger it seemed. What made an invented object special? Why were some manmade things pleasing and others not? Why wasn’t a regular mixing bowl or a spoon or a lightbulb a piece of art? What made certain objects land in museums and others in the trash? She guessed that most people who went to museums didn’t ask that question. ” — Excerpt from “Chasing Vermeer”
“Calder’s mother had once told him that he breathed patterns the way other people breathed air. Calder sighed. If only thoughts didn’t have to be broken down into words. Too much talk was hard to listen to, and writing, for him, was a brutal process. So much got left behind.”
— Excerpt from “Chasing Vermeer”
———-
SQUARE DANCE
TWO WORDS YOU DON’T EXPECT to find in the same sentence: “math” and “fun.”
But with pentominoes, funny-shaped objects that enable readers to unravel parts of Blue Balliett’s “Chasing Vermeer,” the two words hang out together like best friends on a sum-mer Saturday.
Each pentomino is composed of five squares; the side of one of those five squares must touch one other square. There are 12 unique shapes; those shapes correspond roughly to the letters F, I, L, N, P, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.
Among the many puzzles that you can do with pentominoes-which are available in toy stores and school supply stores-is create a single rectangle with all 12 pieces. It’s harder than it looks.
Pentominoes as a concept have been around for centuries, but the word wasn’t officially coined until 1953 by mathematician Dr. Solomon W. Golomb of the University of Southern California, according to several sources. His book, “Polyominoes” (Scribner’s, 1965), revels in the challenge and beauty of the objects. There are also thousands of Web sites specializing in pentomino games.
And if you think playing with little pieces of colored plastic is child’s play, get this: Golomb, who specializes in cryptography as well as radar signal design, was the first person to bounce a radar signal off another planet. His research in electrical engineering and communications was instrumental in developing cell phones.
— Julia Keller
READ & WRITE 2004
For young readers who’ve recently read a terrific book and would like to share their thoughts, we invite you to write a short review about the book and send it to the Read & Write project. We plan to publish many of the reviews throughout the month of August in the Books section of the Tribune. We’d also love to see drawings about your favorite book, either in place of or to accompany the review. Details about Read & Write are at chicagotribune.com/books or many public libraries. The deadline for submissions is July 22. We look forward to hearing from you.
