Why the long face?(Book Review)

Barbara Feinberg Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up. Beacon Press, 209 pages, $23.00

In the seventh grade, at my small public middle school, I grumbled persistently about the books my English teacher assigned. She sensed in my recalcitrance a chance for experimentation and devised a new curriculum for me: I would read the entire oeuvre of a fellow called Robert Cormier--best known for his once-controversial The Chocolate War--and interview him by telephone.

The project was not a pleasant one. Jerry Renault, the protagonist of The Chocolate War, is essentially a Holden Caulfield clone; the book is gloomy and pedantic: all life is suffering, non illegitimi carborundum, and the like. Cormier's other "young adult novels" hinge on home invasion, a school bus hijacking, a boy living in an experimental medical clinic, and other hypothetical "growing pains." The interview that capped off my grueling reading confirmed my suspicion that this author wishes to teach children that life isn't fair and get used to it.

Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel, which looks at the popularity among educators of just this sort of "problem novel," never mentions Cormier--but the books it does mention are, against all odds, even uglier than his. Next to the classics of children's literature (I would hold up the work of C. S. Lewis, E. B. White, or even Roald Dahl), these books are "narrower in focus, less rich in narrative scope, and at times [fed] 'as if the writers had begun with the problem rather than the plot or characters.'"

What might that problem be? Take your pick. While doing research, Feinberg encounters a librarian who offers this apt precis of the "problem novel": "Oh--my mother's boyfriend raped me, and my mother is in jail, and I have a brain tumor? Those books?" Indeed--and the fact that those books are so contrived, so unsubtle, must account for much of the emphasis today's curricula place upon them. Children, says Feinberg, desire "recourse to fantasy"; a teacher may see fantasy as an impediment to instruction.

It has become a part of the teacher's perceived duty to expose children to the nasty side of life--as though life itself were not perfectly capable of doing so. Yet, strangely, the means children use to cope with that nastiness--imagination, humor, and storytelling--are given shorter and shorter shrift. For example, Feinberg's seven-year-old daughter is placed in a writing program at school, in which she is to write, of all things, a memoir. (Just the facts, ma'am.)

 
   In the quirky, conditional voice with which 
   Clair has written about our lives as if all the 
   things in our lives are over, have already 
   passed, used to be, "would" occur, and are 
   present now only in memory, the implication 
   is that these things occur no more.... 
 
      This whole enterprise is something adults 
   have imposed. And why? Why is my generation 
   hell-bent on making our children wake 
   from the dream of their childhoods? So they 
   can fast-forward to a time when their childhoods 
   are over, safely encoded in memory? So 
   they are like adults, dreamy with nostalgia?