I just finished reading Cormier's The Chocolate War and I'm more than a little frustrated. Jerry Renault is all set up to "disturb the universe" and rebel against his injust and oppresive private catholic school (in four posts I have already had to attack catholics twice mind you) but, instead, he just takes an ass whoopin and says "I should have sold the damn chocolates." (In not so many words, or maybe a few more).
This is such a morbid look at adolescent males. None of them have any emotional connections, they all beat off in the bathroom, and almost all of them are sadistic, evil bastards. If this is a realistic look at the world then life sucks. At least Jerry could have continued to rebel and leave us with some sense of justice beyond what Brother Jaques may or may not do to Archie. And on that note, who thought Archie would pick the damn white marble? Raise your hand. Give us something Cormier.
And there is no way that any school would let the students have a private "pep rally" on the football field.
The mob mentality of the students really got me too. These people are so sick that nobody tries to stop what is happening? And what the hell was Goober doing just sitting there too afraid to act? I wanted to reach in the book and give a virtual back-hand to that guy. I guess I just have an overwhelming sense of depression stemming from this book. I think I'm gonna sit in my room with the latest Hawthorne Heights album and slit my wrists with an unwound paper clip.
An interesting similarity between this story and Speak (to change the subject) are the parents. They are completely unable to connect with their children on any emotional level. What is YA trying to say by having all these types of parents? Have they really lost all ability to love and care for their children? Certainly the institution of the family has been cracked and all but destroyed in these books. There is no caring base of "home" where the adolescent can feel safe. Instead they are emotionally void places where the main characters only find more hostility. Certainly, there is a change in the family dynamics in this age but how drastic is it? It seems very drastic in these books and all around as well, even in the 70's when The Chocolate War was written.
Kids these days...
2 comments:
Hah, I love that bit about the paper clip. I laughed out loud when I read that.
Seriously, you raise a key issue when you talk about the depiction of the parents in both Anderson and Cormier. There are differences, of course: Anderson confronts head-on the fact that Mel's family simply doesn't work well together, whereas Cormier seems to imply that both Jerry and his father are reeling from grief and, in effect, traumatized. Certainly we hear more about the parents in Anderson than we do in Cormier; what is mostly an absence in The Chocolate War is a full-blown problem, one Mel is very aware of, in Speak.
This issue has to do in part, I think, with the need for YA books to test the mettle of their adolescent protagonists without having them rely too much on parental help. In other words, there's a tendency to "orphan" the protagonists, at least figuratively, emotionally, so that they have to find other resources and other ways to face their problems, without leaning on their folks for help. It's a very common trope of YA literature, indeed of children's literature too but to an understandably lesser extent. YA literature tends to be less about childlike discovery and more about negotiating between various social and institutional factors that shape your life (as Roberta Trites argues in her book on YA, Disturbing the Universe), and so there's a tendency to dissolve familial bonds, etc., so that the characters must do their own negotiating.
One thing that often distinguishes between children's and YA books is the extent to which the adult characters are recognized as flawed and screwed-up. In a lot of YA books I've read, the parental figures are screwed-up, lost, or uncertain, as is the case with Jerry's father or Mel's parents. You could look at this as a sign of maturation and a true reflection of social reality, or you could look at it as a convention of the genre, since the books typically demand adolescent protagonists who have to do their own problem-solving.
Some readers defend the negativity of Cormier's vision by saying that he's more "realistic" than most YA authors. Do you think that's the case? Is The Chocolate War a realistic book, or just one that likes to bruise the reader? :)
I think that Cormier tries to hit on one specific element of reality. Mainly, that life can really suck and heroes and good guys don't always win. Also, situations don't always end in a nice positive or even hopeful manner.
I think that, though this is a good point and it certainly causes a good deal of controversy in the YA genre, it is portrayed in ways that are often to exaggerated to be "realistic." The "students only" pep rally for instance would never be allowed to happen at any school.
Going back to the parents, and adults in general, there has to be some parent or teacher associated with the school that isn't a completely useless or negative role model. Life might suck, but it's not THAT bad.
Also, as Perry Nodelman points out, all the characters in the story seem to be hiding some terrible secret from the other characters and they assume that everyone is trying to "find them out." In the real world people have their own issues to deal with and for the most part don't give a crap about yours.
So, while I do see some things that I would consider more realistic than most other romanticized YA literature, there are also many elements that are so overdone as to actually be un-realistic.
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