A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  Revisionist history is still history, still subject to normal standards of demonstrable historical evidence and sound reasoning. While these three novels approach the Revolution from different points of view, they are firmly grounded in documented evidence. Different as they are in emphasis and attitude, all three stay within the bounds of eighteenth-century American social history. None ignores known historical realities to accommodate political ideology.

  A good many historical novels for children do. Children’s literature, historical as well as contemporary, has been politicized over the past forty years; new social sensibilities have changed the way Americans view the past. Feminist re-readings of history and insistence by minorities on the importance — and the difference — of their experience have made authors and publishers sensitive to how their books portray people often overlooked or patronized in earlier literature. The traditional concentration on boys and men has modified; more minorities are included, and the experience of ordinary people — as opposed to movers and shakers — gets more attention. American historical literature, including children’s, takes a less chauvinistic approach to American history than it once did, revising the traditional chronicle of unbroken upward progress.

  However, amid the cheers for this enlightenment are occasional murmurs of doubt — and there ought to be more. Too much historical fiction for children is stepping around large slabs of known reality to tell pleasant but historically doubtful stories. Even highly respected authors snip away the less attractive pieces of the past to make their narratives meet current social and political preferences.

  Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall won the Newbery Medal in 1985. It is a simple, warmhearted tale, as popular with children as with adults (which cannot be said of every Newbery winner). The setting is a nineteenth-century farm on the American prairie, though exactly where and when is unspecified. Since there is no mention of farm machinery, and since there is a reference to plowing a new field in the prairie, the period would seem to be the 1870s. Sarah, an unmarried young woman, answers a newspaper ad and travels from Maine to the Midwest to stay with a widowed man and his two children for a month. The understanding is that if all goes well, she and the father will marry. If not, she will return to Maine. She comes alone and stays in the house with no other woman there.

  The realities of nineteenth-century social mores are at odds with practically all of this. It was unusual for a woman to travel such distances alone, and much more than unusual for her to stay with a man not related to her without another woman in the house. Had she done so, however, it is unlikely that she could return home afterward with her reputation intact. MacLachlan has said that her story is based on a family experience a couple of generations ago, and I have no reason to question that. Even so, the story as told is highly uncharacteristic of its time and place.

  Besides bypassing the usual social strictures of the time, the novel also glides lightly over a basic reality of farm life in the nineteenth century: work. More than work, in fact — toil, a word that has all but disappeared from modern vocabularies. Hamlin Garland, who grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Iowa in the 1860s and 1870s, wrote about his experience in A Son of the Middle Border. Again and again, Garland describes the constant labor of a farm family’s life. A farm asked a great deal of boys and men, yet women’s work, Garland said, was even more relentless. “Being a farmer’s wife in those days meant laboring outside any regulation of the hours of toil . . . a slavish round with never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the tugging hands of children and the need of mending and washing clothes . . . from the churn to the stove, from the stove to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and clothing mended for the night.”

  While no one expects a child’s book to be a litany of toil, work was so central to daily life on a farm that one does expect to see it treated as more than incidental. As Laura Ingalls Wilder tells her Little House stories, the work people did are events in a child’s life, as indeed they were; the cheese making and the building of a new door were as memorable for Laura as Pa’s fiddling. In Sarah, Plain and Tall, work is named but not described; somehow it is manageable enough to give Sarah leisure to lie in the fields admiring nature or making daisy chains for the children. And there is an interchange of jobs between Sarah and the farmer-father that is more New Age than nineteenth century. Papa bakes bread; Sarah helps to reshingle a roof and learns, under Papa’s tutelage, to plow. While none of this was impossible, neither was it typical. Division of labor on a farm was a matter of practicality as well as custom. Papa would not often have been in the house enough to tend bread, and Sarah would have plenty to do without taking up plowing.

  Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was a Newbery Honor Book in 1991. It’s a fine vicarious adventure story. It is also preposterous. The reader is asked to believe that in 1832, a thirteen-year-old girl boards a sailing ship to go from England to America, joins the crew of hard-bitten sailors (all with hearts more or less of gold), performs surpassingly difficult feats of physical strength and daring under the eye of a villainous captain who hates her, and not only survives (sexually unsullied, of course) but becomes captain of the ship. Home at last, she tries out conventional life with her parents for a week or so and finds it restrictive — unsurprisingly — so she climbs out of the window and returns to her old ship as crew. Great fun if you are twelve or thirteen — but fantasy.

  Catherine, Called Birdy (a 1995 Newbery Honor Book) by Karen Cushman is a brave excursion into medieval social history through the diary of a fourteen-year-old who questions nearly everything that governed the lives of medieval people in general and of women in particular. Birdy’s world is real enough — rough, dirty, and uncomfortable most of the time, even among the privileged classes. Her feisty independence is perhaps believable, as is her objection to being “sold like a parcel” in marriage to add to her father’s status or land. However, those were standard considerations in marriage among the landholding classes, for sons as well as daughters, and Birdy’s repeated resistance might have drawn much harsher punishment than she got. The fifteenth-century Paston Letters record what happened to a daughter who opposed her mother about a proposed match: “She has since Easter [three months before this letter] been beaten once in the week or twice, sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places.” As the historian of the Paston papers points out, “The idea that children . . . had any natural rights was almost impossible to a medieval mind. Children were just chattels . . . entirely at the direction and disposal of their fathers.”

  Cushman sticks to historical reality while Birdy considers and discards the few alternatives to marriage she can think of — running away, becoming a goat-keeper, joining a monastery. But once her heroine agrees to her father’s final, awful choice for her, Cushman quickly supplies an exit. The intended husband dies, so Birdy can marry his son, who, fortunately, is heir to the land and thereby meets her father’s purposes. The son is, of course, young and educated, where his father was old, ugly, and illiterate. Even granting that life is unpredictable, so fortuitous an escape strains the framework. In fairness, I think Cushman knew this; she just flinched at consigning her likable character to her likely fate.

  And therein lies the difficulty I find with these and many other contemporary historical novels. They evade the common realities of the societies they write about. In novels about girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer choices than their cultures would in fact have offered. To do that, they set aside the social mores of the past as though they were minor afflictions, small obstacles, easy — and painless — for an independent mind to overcome.

  To see authors vaulting blithely over the barriers women lived with for so long brings to mind Anna Karenina. Anna’s is the story these contemporary writers don’t want
to tell. When she left her husband and child for Vronsky, Anna suffered all the sanctions her society imposed on women who defied its rules. Whether the reader, or for that matter, Tolstoy, finds the rules unfair or the sanctions too harsh is irrelevant. Tolstoy was telling the story of a woman who lived when and where she lived, who made the choices she made, and who was destroyed by the consequences.

  Most contemporary writers of historical fiction research the topics and the times they have chosen, and they often provide information about the facts and sources they have used. Yet their narratives play to modern sensibilities. Their protagonists experience their own societies as though they were time travelers, noting racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and outmoded belief as outsiders, not as people of and in their cultures.

  Historical-fiction writers who want their protagonists to reflect twentieth-first-century ideologies end by making them exceptions to their cultures, so that in many a historical novel the reader learns nearly nothing — or at least nothing sympathetic — of how the people of a past society saw their world. Characters are divided into right — those who believe as we do — and wrong; that is, those who believe something that we now disavow. Such stories suggest that people of another time either did understand or should have understood the world as we do now, an outlook that quickly devolves into the belief that people are the same everywhere and in every time.

  But people of the past were not just us in odd clothing. They were people who saw the world differently; approached human relationships differently; people for whom night and day, heat and cold, seasons and work and play had meanings lost to an industrialized, technological age. Even if human nature is much the same over time, human experience, perhaps especially everyday experience, is not. To wash these differences out of historical fiction is not only a denial of historical truth but a failure of imagination and understanding that diminishes the present as well as the past.

  MORE GREAT HISTORICAL FICTION

  Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains

  316 pp. Grades 5–8. Slaves Isabel and Ruth are shipped to New York in May 1776, where Isabel helps foil her Loyalist master’s scheme to kill George Washington. Anderson’s novel is remarkable for its strong sense of place and nuanced portrait of slavery during the Revolutionary War. Sequel: Forge.

  M. T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

  359 pp. Grade 9 and up. Young slave Octavian has received, as an experiment, a classical education; in a precise eighteenth-century voice, he narrates the details of his surreal life inside Boston’s Novanglian College of Lucidity. Anderson savages the hypocrisy of the nascent United States, creating an alternative narrative of our national mythology. The story continues in Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves.

  Audrey Couloumbis and Akila Couloumbis, War Games: A Novel Based on a True Story

  233 pp. Grades 5–8. Greek brothers Petros, twelve, and Zola, fifteen, are prone to quarrel. The advent of World War II and the invasion of their village by the Germans only fuel the brothers’ competition. But when a Nazi colonel moves into their house, the boys realize how serious their games have become. A gripping story and a fine introduction to a complex time.

  Christopher Paul Curtis, Elijah of Buxton

  344 pp. Grades 4–6. Eleven-year-old Elijah is the first child to be born free in Buxton, a refuge for freed slaves established in 1849 in Canada. An arresting, surprising coming-of-age novel, a moving story of reluctant heroism.

  Louise Erdrich, The Porcupine Year

  193 pp. Grades 5–8. In this third book about Omakayas (The Birchbark House; The Game of Silence), a renegade uncle robs the family, leaving them close to starvation as winter closes in. Erdrich presents another tale full of rich details of 1850s Ojibwe life, complicated characters, and all the joys and challenges of a girl becoming a woman.

  Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

  340 pp. Grades 4–6. In 1889 Texas, eleven-year-old Calpurnia and her gruff, intimidating grandfather share an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, culminating in their thrilling discovery of a new plant species. Callie’s struggle to identify herself as a scientist amidst very different expectations for her future will resonate with young readers.

  Ellen Klages, The Green Glass Sea

  324 pp. Grades 4–6. In 1943, ten-year-old Dewey’s dad is working at Los Alamos with hundreds of other scientists and their families. Klages evokes both the big-sky landscape of the Southwest and a community where “everything is secret,” focusing on the society of the children who live there. Sequel: White Sands, Red Menace.

  Matt Phelan, The Storm in the Barn

  203 pp. Grades 5–8. This stunning graphic novel brings 1937 Kansas, wracked by drought and hardship, to life, adding a supernatural twist. Exploring an abandoned barn, eleven-year-old Jack encounters a mysterious, threatening figure with a face of rain and a bag that flashes lightning. Phelan’s palette of sepias, dusty browns, and charcoal grays perfectly evokes the desolate landscapes of the Dust Bowl.

  Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

  218 pp. Grades 4–6. Eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters spend the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California, visiting their estranged poet mother. Change is in the air — for the girls and for the country. Williams-Garcia writes vividly about that turbulent summer through the intelligent, honest, vulnerable voice of Delphine.

  The art of comedy is a matter of timing and balance. The great comic writer plays the reader like a fish. We are hooked by the plausible and the familiar. We are given false freedom as the line plays out. Finally, at just the right moment, we are flipped out of our element to lie helpless and gasping on the deck. It is all about finesse.

  The writer for children, however, is humbled by the fact that, when the laff-o-meter is running, all this artfulness can be completely trumped by a phrase such as peanut butter belly button. Middle-grade readers are ready for a broad range of humor — jokey, satirical, slapstick, wacky, and melodramatic — but none of it can stray too far from the banana peel.

  Jokes, comedy’s smallest components, give young readers micro-narratives, an excellent introduction to the notions of theme and variation, the construction and release of tension, and the power and slipperiness of language. Best of all, jokes are sociable, a link to story’s oral roots, demanding collusion between teller and audience. The discovery of the potential of the chicken crossing the road can be a liberating experience for a kid.

  In Adam Gopnik’s essay collection Through the Children’s Gate, he describes his young son’s discovery of the joke “Waiter, what’s a fly doing in my soup?” and all its variants. This discovery leads Gopnik to a reminiscence of his own childhood delight in old-style Jewish comics. He writes, “None of them talked about ‘jokes’ that you ‘told.’ Instead they talked about ‘bits’ that they ‘did’ — and killed ‘them’ doing it. That, for me, explained everything, life and art. Life was stuff that happened, art was bits you did.”

  The joke book section of libraries is often high in circulation and low in respect. It is true that adult joke books have a whiff of desperation about them (“Spark up that sales conference!” “Shine at parties!”), but children’s joke books are a different kettle of fish, an early introduction to the notion that, as Gopnik discovered, art is active, something you do. When art succeeds, it is interactive. For the reader who hasn’t yet learned to settle in to a page of print, jokes have the huge advantage of being short — and they seem to be particularly appealing to boys, possibly because they are a kind of narrative that can be competitive.

  Joke anthologies are one of the few kinds of children’s literature in which quality matters less than bulk. A good joke book is a fat joke book. Readers need a big pool to dip into. Lavish color illustrations overwhelm jokes and make them uncomfortable. Jokes like low-quality paper and cartoon illustrations. They like to be stuffed into backpacks and taken to the beach. They positively enjoy br
oken spines and grease stains. The Whopping Great Big Bonkers Joke Book: Over 1000 Side-Splitting Jokes is perfect. “Knock, knock,” “Doctor, doctor,” and “What do you get if you cross something with something?” — all the standard forms are there. There’s an old-fashioned edge to jokes that often makes them a bridge between generations. Astronauts may not be of much interest to contemporary children, but they live on in jokes. “If an athlete gets athlete’s foot, what does an astronaut get? Missile toe.”

  The retro tradition of jokes doesn’t give joke books carte blanche to be offensive, however. Jay Leno’s How to Be the Funniest Kid in the Whole Wide World makes you wonder in what universe he has been living for the last fifty years. It’s not actually okay to make jokes about “Eskimos” and fat people anymore, Jay. The general principle of avoiding children’s books written by celebrities is in no way threatened by this feeble production.

  In the right hands, the impulse toward stand-up can also be harnessed for use in longer fictions. Neal Shusterman’s The Schwa Was Here is constructed from the Lego of jokes, its surface one long stand-up routine. Hey, did you hear the one about the blind girl and the invisible boy? What about the one about the Italian and the Jew? The hero, Antsy, has a wisecracking, Brooklynese voice and a crazy goal. He wants to turn his friend, Schwa, into a legend. Shusterman knows all the tricks. There’s the rule of three, in which if you mention something three times, it becomes funny. There’s the delayed punch line, in which you get your reader to almost, but not quite, forget a reference, and then you bring it out with a flourish.

  The Schwa Was Here also makes hay with the “ew, yuck!” factor of juvenile humor. Reading it is a bit like driving members of a junior-high boys’ soccer team to a distant game. Sooner or later you know it is all going to be covered — bad breath, regurgitation, condiment bottles up the nose, dead rodents, armpits, and the little plastic strainer at the bottom of urinals. There’s more here than Captain Underpants, however. The bits, the corny old jokes, add up to a thought-provoking, unsentimental, subversive portrait of friendship, rivalry, fame, and heroism.