THE PEANUTS PAPERS

Top-flight writers contemplate “Peanuts,” a comic strip that’s especially inviting to a wealth of interpretations.

That’s partly because the apparent simplicity of Charles Schulz’s creation was often deceptive: Ivan Brunetti is one of a handful of cartoonists here who note that Schulz rendered a variety of expressions with inimitable ease. “He made comics into a broader language of emotion,” concurs Chris Ware. The emotion most contributors gravitate to is melancholy, which is to say that Charlie Brown gets much of the attention. He embodies a “daily tragedy” (Umberto Eco); an “introduction to adult problems” (Chuck Klosterman); and a “gospel” of “disillusionment” (Jonathan Franzen). Even free-wheeling Snoopy is often seen as an existential figure: As Sarah Boxer writes, he is “shallow in his way, but he’s also deep, and in the end deeply alone, as deeply alone as Charlie Brown is.” Tales of Brown-ian embarrassments and insecurities abound, though often in a spirit of gratitude toward Schulz for ferrying the authors into adulthood. Among the most powerful contributions are Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell’s “Happiness Is Fleeting,” about her insecurity as a young artist, and Jennifer Finley Boylan’s “You’re Weird Sir,” about her identification with Peppermint Patty while growing up “a closeted transgender child.” The bulk of the pieces are personal essays, which can feel tonally repetitive, and there are too few actual comics. However, there’s plenty of entertaining counterprogramming. Jonathan Lethem’s “Grief” is a winning mashup of "Peanuts" quotes and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”; Peter Kramer considers Lucy’s 5-cent psychiatry booth from the perspective of professional psychiatry; and Elissa Schappell stands up for Charlie’s kid sister, Sally, an iconoclast too often dismissed as the strip’s dim bulb. “Sally isn’t innocent, she’s cynical,” Schappell insists; if there’s a running theme to this book, it’s that Schulz masterfully imagined a world filled with children that is also bereft of innocence. Other notable contributors include George Saunders, David Hajdu, Ann Patchett, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Essential reading for “Peanuts” fans and an appealing collection of personal writing for any reader.