This Bridge Will Not Be Gray by Dave Eggers (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Bridge Will Not Be Gray by Dave Eggers Elizabeth Bush Eggers, Dave This Bridge Will Not Be Gray; illus. Tucker Nichols McSweeney’s, 2015 [104p] ISBN 978-1-940450-47-6 $19.95 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 2-6 Emanating from this year’s Blue Ribbons discussion (for results, see this issue) is the observation that there are a growing number of unruly authors and illustrators defying our comfortable notions of how information can be packaged for kids. While this presents a challenge to committee members accustomed to slipping contenders into longstanding categories, it is a boon to real live child readers who appreciate “true stories” but eschew anything that smacks of pedagogy. A thoroughly delightful case study in this shake-up is Eggers and Nichols’ take on the Golden Gate Bridge, an instructive exposition in which no lengths of cable are measured, load bearing is not discussed, and only a single date—1928—makes an appearance. Eggers opens with two extensions of land facing each other across a bay, and the logical impetus to span the water with a bridge. From this simple idea rose the first of several controversies. Why build a bridge that would mar the area’s natural beauty, especially when boats seemed to work just fine? But in 1928 bridge builder Joseph Strauss was hired to design a bridge anyway. Which led to another controversy: his design was ugly. Enter Leon Moisseiff, another bridge designer with a somewhat more palatable aesthetic sense. With the arrival of yet another designer, Irving Morrow, they finally had it just about right: “This bridge, built to span this beautiful land against this beautiful sea, had to be beautiful itself.” Now for the color: “Isn’t that a strange thing, that a very large group of adults would undertake a project of this size, and not have a color picked out?” Here we reach the central point. Color is one weighty idea, and each opinion on the correct color for the bridge reflected the agenda of the nominator. Gray was the safe, traditional route: “Gray was a serious color. Gray was a practical color. Gray was dignified. Who could object to gray?” The Navy and Army, concerned with the safety of their ships and planes passing nearby, argued for black and yellow or red and white stripes: “This is true. This is a factual book. The Army wanted it to look like a candy cane for the same reason the Navy wanted it to look like a tiger with jaundice.” Morrow, though, watched the steel beams rise above the bay clad in the orange rustproof paint in which all steel made a salty sea journey, and he liked what he saw. And people agreed about the “orange steel against the green hills, above the blue water, below the blue-and-white sky. . . . For some reason, that looks right.” Stripped down to its essentials, this story is accessible to readers just gaining their footing on the written word. Touched up with spare poesy and flashes of irreverence, it is inviting to older readers weary of instructional tone. Carefully structured to emulate the unstudied cadence of a speaker carried away with his [End Page 239] own enthusiasm (“First there were the cables. No. Wait. First there were the towers. Of course the towers were first”), it challenges readers to note the stumble and compare it with the primly edited, slickly polished prose they usually encounter in nonfiction books. And while Eggers shapes his informational text into its sleek, playful form, Nichols does the same with his paper collage, set against vivid-toned backgrounds in full-bleed, full-spread visuals. At first glance, this is this kind of construction that raises the reaction, “Oh, heck. I could do that.” The shapes are little more than suggestions of mass and space, and even the paper appears to be of humble photo copy and construction stock. But upon closer examination of the elegant balance of elements in the compositions, and the neat distribution of positive and negative space, it’s clear most of us could never do this after all. Like Irving Morrow, Nichols has the eye. We reach...