Speaking of Young Adult "problem novels"...

[mmcirvin]

Laura Miller on Why Teachers Love Depressing Books (NYT; registration probably required).

Only a reader as attuned to realism as [Barbara] Feinberg [author of ''Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up''] could have puzzled out so nuanced a defense of imagination in children's lives. She sees the memoirlike problem novels as symptoms of ''the drastic fall from grace that the imagination has suffered in popular understanding'' and her generation's insistence on ''making our children wake from the dream of their childhoods.'' Adults, she suspects, secretly resent the sheltered, enchanted world children inhabit and under the pretext of preparing them for life's inevitable difficulties, want to rub their noses in traumas they may never actually experience and often aren't yet able to comprehend. All the better to turn them into miniature grown-ups, little troupers girded to face a world where they have no one to count on but themselves.

Miller mentions The Phantom Tollboth as an example of the other kind of book, the kind Feinberg's son actually wants to read. The thing that has always amazed me about The Phantom Tollboth specifically is that it manages to be so entertaining even though it's quite explicitly a didactic allegorical novel, a type that is usually a drag.

Comments

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

My mom was just trying to complain about this to me, and while I think there's a good point here (kids seem to either find heavy material hilarious or impenetrable), my mom didn't have it. "I don't want the kids to feel _guilty_ about the holocaust! And they're telling the kids that we killed the Indians, but really, they killed just as many of us too." I just left that one alone.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's really a separate issue. For one thing, you could cover that heavy historical material in engaging ways. Nobody is ever going to accuse Huckleberry Finn of being a downer Problem Novel, yet at its heart it has a searing examination of one of the heaviest issues in American history, and a dilemma raising the question of where morality comes from.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And its young hero is a destitute orphan who flees and then, if I recall correctly, discovers the dead body of his violently alcoholic father! It's a situation that could have easily turned into a static weeper, but Mark Twain didn't let it, and in fact had active contempt for that kind of writing.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Wull, my mom seemed to be on the side of the author of the article (is all I was getting at), but for her own ill-thought-out reasons. That was all I wanted to mention. It would seem that generally all these historical-conflict situations are really fairly complex, perhaps too much so for a simple little book for kids. On occasion I wonder how one SHOULD handle these things; you can't just put it off until the child reaches the age to understand fully.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I dunno about the indian thing. I think it's mostly true that some tribes killed just as many white settlers as white settlers killed american indians. the white settlers were just more effective, and also indiscriminate.

plus, the heavy emphasis on how-white-people-committed-genocide kind of glosses over the examples of peaceful or at least grudgingly tolerant interactions between the two cultures. it also completely ignores interbreeding. a large number of americans have a little indian blood in them. I'm part cherokee, for example -- even have a copy of the bond one of my ancestors had to pay in order to get married to a cherokee woman. so, although the cherokee were a good example of an unfairly mistreated tribe (what with the Trail of Tears and all,) I can't quite get behind the idea of "white people are evil, the european colonization was wrong". I would not and could not exist without the european colonization, nor could Will Rogers or Jonathan Winters or a whole bunch of other people... and I think the fruitful interactions, both in terms of interbreeding and in terms of crosscultural borrowing, have produced far more good than isolation of cultures ever would have.

besides, much as history teachers would like to be able to label each group as all good or all bad, it was never quite so sharp a distinction as they'd prefer. the cherokee, for example, fought on the side of the Confederacy, because some cherokee owned slaves. not many, because most were too poor, but there they were.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My impression of the Cherokees (it's likely that I'm partly one too, given my paternal grandfather's obviously American Indian appearance and Oklahoma background) is that they made a conscious decision sometime in the 18th or 19th century to be cultural assimiliationists, which is why there was so much interbreeding with them... and it seemed to be working for them for a while, but then the white people fucked them over especially hard.

The situation is confused by the fact that the Cherokees thereafter got a reputation for being Good Indians, and the name became used as a genealogical euphemism for "non-white, misc." which often really meant "black" or something else.

Whether the balance of 500 years of history of the Americas is for better or for worse... is probably not a useful question, since there's no going back and, really, no precise making of amends, except in the most addled of political fantasies. The important question is whether we've learned anything. Kids are badly served by being fed either heroic myths or unearned personal accusations.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Whatever good came out of European colonization of America doesn't change the crimes committed during that time. In South America, there were systematic processes designed to abuse and keep the natives down and submissive. These are taught as part of history in school, but even today the natives are treated as ignorant rabble, at least in Ecuador.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I've always suspected that people all too often confuse depressing storytelling with depth and meaning. It's the biggest cliché ever: If you can't make your story interesting otherwise, make it TRAGIC! The people will praise it even if it is formulaic and essentially uninteresting.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I actually often like stories that really are tragic in the classical sense, but people all too often confuse that with stuff that is just undirectedly weepy.

Part of it may be a symptom of things that happened in mainstream adult fiction in the late 20th century. There was a sense for a while that the most worthy stories were internal tales about a character learning to live with the results of a personal catastrophe, or achieving a personal synthesis of American culture with ethnic background, or realizing his or her true sexuality, or some such thing-- stories in which the action is mostly in one person's head and the reward is simply figuring out how to live as an adult in the everyday world. The YA problem novels are to some extent junior versions of that.

I get the feeling that mainstream fiction is actually waking from this particular obsession to some extent: the internal stories are still there, and there's nothing inherently wrong with them for those what like that sort of thing, but there's also some cross-pollination with SF, fantasy and thrillers and a feeling that you can write big stories with adventure and ideas in them.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

We're reading The Phantom Tollbooth RITE NOW! Yes, it's a little 'heavy' for a seven-year-old...he doesn't get a lot of the wordplay and misses some of the meaning, but I get the feeling it's the kind of book he's going to remember forever.