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 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 [feel] ‘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 précis 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?
“Dreamy with nostalgia” is not quite the phrase this exercise suggests. Quite to the contrary, the impulse to teach seven year olds the art of memoir seems of a piece with the therapy obsession of Barbara Feinberg’s generation. That this obsession is trickling down to the young is everywhere in evidence. Witness the phenomenon of “reality television”: participants are startlingly adept at discussing and interpreting their behavior and feelings, but at a total loss when it comes to applying this self-knowledge in a useful way.
It hardly needs stating that this preoccupation is not something that ought to be encouraged in young children. It tends more than anything else to foster a myopic self-absorption. Feinberg notes that (according to the children’s literature specialist Sheila Egoff), “problem novels” are “often told in the first person, and [are] often confessional and self-centered.” (This mode will be familiar to anyone who has rolled his eyes through a creative writing “workshop.”)
Again, the thinking seems to be that the earlier children learn that life will kick them when they’re down—and that constant, focused reflection of life’s worst elements is the best medicine—the better off they’ll be. Whether or not this outlook is even remotely therapeutic for adults, Feinberg makes it clear that it isn’t for children—whether in their writing or reading. But what should be encouraged instead?
Feinberg is herself a teacher. She runs a children’s arts program called Story Shop, and her methods sound far better suited to a child’s taste than any memoir-writing program: “Children write stories, and tell them, and enact them, and build scenes and characters out of paper and boxes and odds and ends.” In other words, her young charges have complete freedom to pursue the fantastic and absurd, without the stifling intrusion of adult concerns.
They don’t have to write about themselves, either. Feinberg insists that “Interest in a child’s experience, as a means toward vitalizing writing, is constraining, not expanding, if I insist that the only meaningful story a child can relay is one that is actual.”
It should surprise no one that children prefer fantasy to reflection; at seven years old, one doesn’t have much to reflect upon. But there is an even clearer reason for it: when teachers insist upon sobriety, realism, and—whether or not they intend it—disillusionment, they miss the point that a vigorous imagination in fact fortifies one against unhappiness.
A case in point: Feinberg learns from a friend who works in an orphanage that suffering children, even ones as old as twelve or thirteen, prefer Mother Goose to “problem novels” like Bridge to Terebithia (in which the main character’s best friend drowns) or They Cage the Animals at Night (about a boy abandoned to foster care by his mother). For these children, the smallest comfort or creative indulgence is preferable to dwelling on their own tragedies.
Of course, at its best, the adult desire to examine the self is indispensable. But in contemporary literature, popular culture, and education, the activity reeks of navel-gazing and self-satisfaction, not the pursuit of virtue or maturity. Children naturally have the right idea: they grow by looking outward with a curious and often selfless eye.
The final surprise of Lizard Motel is that Barbara Feinberg does not make her recommendations from a comfortable perch. The book, as noted on its jacket, is largely a memoir itself. The last third deals with Feinberg’s young daughter’s surgeries for a benign (though recurring) inner ear tumor. It’s the stuff of “problem novels,” to be sure, but Feinberg dodges the temptation to be dark—or to exploit her family’s difficulty. Instead she offers her story as proof that humor and imagination are the thing:
Just as we come to the door of the operating room, Clair gets out of the car. As we are about to enter, she suddenly falls to her knees, grabbing the anesthesiologist, who is a sober German named Dr. Schmidt, and says, “You gotta help me, Doc! I’m doomed. I’ve got a wife and three kids at home!” Dr. Schmidt and the rest of us are bewildered, and frozen, for the moment. But then everyone bursts out laughing . . . . [Clair] shrugs and says, “I saw that on a Bugs Bunny cartoon once.”
A joke? Right outside the operating room? Our inward-looking society, with all its indignant victims, ought to give this bedside manner a try.