Book Review: Beany Malone

Title: Beany Malone

(Yes, all the original editions of books in this series have tended to fade strangely. The copy I physically own is less badly faded than the picture appears on this browser, but it's faded.)

Author: Lenora Mattingly Weber

Date: 1948

Publisher: Crowell

ISBN: none

Length: 186 pages

Quote: "But then all Saturdays in the Malone house were a hectic, happy hullabaloo."

In the twelve-novel series about Beany Malone's teen years, this first volume is the last one in which all four Malone children are full-time residents in the Malone house. Elizabeth, the eldest sister, had married and moved out in the preliminary novel about middle sister Mary Fred; now she's back, with the baby, while her husband is deployed overseas. Mary Fred is still only trying to get into the sorority house where she'll live for the rest of the series. Johnny and Beany are still in high school, and in addition to their toddler nephew they've been living with two evacuee children from London and an old--positively frail and senile--friend of their father's. Their mother is dead, and their father travels a good deal...and in 1948 leaving these kids on their own to bring up even younger children seems to have been accepted as neither abusive nor even eccentric.

Lenora Mattingly Weber wrote the twelve Beany Malone books, plus the preliminary one about Mary Fred and a follow-up about a child Beany tries to adopt, a couple of horse stories, a pioneer romance, and a spin-off series about the Belford sisters who baby-sat Beany's children in the 1960s. In none of these stories were the characters especially spiritual or introspective; Weber wrote about "normal," shallow, fun-loving kids unburdened by any special talents. In each story Weber tried to explore what being a good Catholic could mean to that sort of teenager. The central character always faced some sort of kid-sized spiritual conflict--take prezzies from their manipulative grandmother, or make do with what they have? hang out with a clique of just four girls and four boys, or with as many friends and relatives as possible?--and usually, as in Beany Malone, this conflict was framed in terms of selfishness versus generosity.

That's what I've always liked, and always disliked, about this author and her work--ever since I "met the Malones" at age ten. The characters are solid, lifelong Christians...but they're only ever allowed to be a numb, half-baked, extrovert sort of Christians. Beany, who shared a patron saint with Kathleen Lenora Weber (to whom Beany Malone was dedicated), seems to have been Weber's favorite character--featured in the most books, and most vividly realized. The stories about her are tidily written bits of fiction, but Beany comes across as a real girl, probably based on some combination of Lenora Mattingly and Kathleen Lenora Weber. Lacking a solid, positive, introvert-type conscience, groping her way through life according to her feelings about personal relationships, Beany is doomed to spend her whole life torn between generous impulses and the feeling that once again she's been too generous.

When the evacuee children rush off toward home with hardly a word of farewell to their host family, leaving Beany to wash melted homemade ice cream down the drain, it's not the first time Beany thinks that her life would be simpler if she could just care less about people. Her whole family's lives would be simpler if they weren't so warmhearted. There's Elizabeth pining for her husband, Mary Fred torn between loyalty to her boyfriend and loyalty to the "campus traditions" the sorority uphold, Johnny obsessed with the idea of getting their father's old friend's memoirs written up before old Emerson becomes unable even to talk, their father "sticking his neck out" for controversial legislation he believes will save lives...and Beany with a crush on a boy in Mary Fred's class who doesn't seem to think much of Mary Fred or Johnny. If only the whole Malone family could stop caring so much, Beany thinks, maybe she'd get over her hopeless crush...talk about a harebrained idea only an extrovert could entertain!

Beany's best school friend has just moved away. That's all we'll learn about the friend for another five books. Beany is (like a surprising number of young extroverts) not popular at school; a plain-looking little thing who really does seem to fade into crowds if she doesn't shove her way to the fore, she seems to talk to a few other girls at school, but not enough to remember their names. The girl Beany wants for her new best friend is, as her old friend turns out to be, positively shy. Kay, whose parents are divorced, believes that her mother will move to yet another neighborhood if Kay has a friend. Weber never will let Beany consider the possibility that she's attracted to people whose brains have developed the parts that are missing from Beany's own brain, nor will she make it clear whether Beany's two close friends are meant to be genuine introverts. Beany perceives Kay's vain, selfish, immature mother as a positive role model of protecting herself and her daughter from getting emotionally involved with other people, even when that means that, among other things, when Kay feels sorry for a stray dog, Beany ends up keeping the dog--and puppies--in Beany's own little bedroom.

All the different Malones' wishes and problems come together in an incredibly tidy plot. Beany Malone lives in a fictional world more like ours than like the Lost Planet of Nice, but this was still considered a children's book, and everybody--even Kay's rather dreadful mother--gets a more or less happy ending.

There's always an element of Teen Romance in each volume of this series and its spin-offs. I should admit that, although and perhaps because Weber tried to de-emphasize sex in these books, the romance always used to strike me as the flimsiest subplot in each book. We're told that Beany has a crush on this older boy, Norbett, because he played the hero in a school drama club production. How stupid is that? Around grade nine I figured out what's really going on. Beany has a physical attraction to Norbett; she doesn't want to admit anything as icky as a physical attraction to a teenage boy--well, that made sense to me--so she tells herself it's just this idealistic admiration of a stage act that obviously has nothing at all to do with the boy's real personality, which will be, throughout the series, rebarbative. Beany really wants to be as close to Norbett as possible; since he's not a pedophile, and she's not that much of a fool, being close means having pleasant warm feelings about getting him onto speaking terms with her brother. O-kay. But all the way through the series I kept hoping that Beany would own up to what she was doing and tell herself to stop projecting all that idiotic idealism onto every hormone surge she felt, and Beany kept trying to convince herself, and readers, that her hormone surges had something to do with love.

Teenaged girls do not, in real life, have to convince themselves that they love or even like every boy to whom they have a hormone reaction. If blessed with adult friends who accept that hormone surges happen, teenaged girls can accept realities like, "I felt physically attracted to a boy in a convenience store in Knoxville. I'll probably never see him again, even if I ever am in Knoxville again, and if I do he'll probably be so different by then I won't recognize him." Or, as in Beany Malone, "That surly, grumpy, sort of funny-looking boy in my sister's class, whom my sister never liked, has some merely superficial, physical appeal to me." In 1948, apparently, some adults still wanted to believe that teenaged girls were spiritually chaste and wouldn't have that kind of reaction...which meant believing that girls like Beany were stupid enough to cast a born loser like Norbett, in their minds, as a noble rescuing hero.

Despite these major defects the Beany Malone books did appeal to me; they appealed to lots of Christian teenagers. If Beany had gone to my school, I remember thinking, how superior to her I'd feel myself and my school friends to be...but then again, the average protagonist of the "girls' books" and "boys' books" cranked out for escape reading, in the pre-television years, was not easily imagined as a three-dimensional living creature at all. Beany Malone had plenty of faults, some known to her author and some not--but she might have gone to my school. In some ways she's a very well written character.

And so I've kept at least one copy of every one of the Beany Malone books, as an adult. I've read a few volumes of criticism in which some splenetic Christian-phobic writer said, more or less, "These books are so demeaning to teenaged girls," meaning, "These books are so overtly about the kind of spiritual life an extrovert brought up in a traditional Christian faith has, in real life...that a girl who reads them might overlook the admitted imperfections in Beany's personality and actually feel respectful of traditional Catholic practices, such as, horrors, confession and repentance."

These books sold well and are only slowly becoming collectors' items, but...still...$10 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, and if you want to collect this series being able to get them shipped in packages of four for $5 per package may result in a substantial saving.