Feinberg, Barbara. Welcome to Lizard Motel

I probably heard Barbara Feinberg on NPR over a year ago, and wanted to get the book because I basically agreed with its premise, but they didn't have it at the library yet and then it fell off my radar for a coupld months until I started reading all these depressing YA books.

It is a book about--if it can be said to be about anything--the author's problem with modern children's/YA literature. It makes her kids depressed and she doesn't like it. So, on the one hand, I'm entirely sympathetic to the book's basic premise. On the other hand, there is something about the arguments that makes me very argumentative; it's a memoir, not an academic study of children's literature, but it feels as if it's drawing sweeping conclusions that it shouldn't be drawing. And on the gripping hand, it's simply not that interesting a book from a kidlit perspective.

Lady, we don't need to hear about your 2nd-grader's ear surgery, okay?

She tries to tie literature gripes and personal life together into a meditation on children's imaginations and their experiences of danger, death, and abandonment, and what we can do to respect them as children and not impose our own morality upon them, but I don't think it works all that well.

Abandoning the personal for the moment, Feinberg has a bunch of arguments that I mostly agree with:
-Children's literature, the kind that wins awards, is pretty bleak and depressing. You've got war, death, depression, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and so on, and so forth.
-And it's not the fun kind of bleak, either. There are fun books about orphans and depressing books about orphans; you know what I'm talking about.
-Generally, the highest value in these books is survival. There's no sense of a possibility of the world opening up, of a hope for something better.
-My children's books used to be nice. Whatever happened to that?

This is where she loses me, because I don't entirely agree with her on which books are sad but good and which are pointlessly bleak; she hates Bridge to Terabithia, which I read when pretty young and which definitely falls into the 'sad but good' category for me. She approaches these books as a mother, I approach them as a librarian (and, almost, as a teenager); if they're good, they're good. Should kids be denied good sad books because they need to be protected?

But Feinberg wins me back a little later when she finally acknowledges that she isn't the sole arbitratory of Depressing Problem Novels:

To read about the anarchic world of The Pigman, at twelve (unthinkable at eight) would have been more than I could handle... How about at fifteen? By then a lot had changed...Every time I destroyed something, I felt free...It might have been fascinating to read, if it had come at the right time.

She goes on to nail the real problem: that the curriculum often emphasizes one thing only, "understanding" a book, interpreting it. You aren't given space to hate books, and if you hate them, it's because you don't understand them well enough. It was a revolutionary feeling, sometime in the middle of high school, to begin to allow myself to hate books without feeling stupid for it, to let myself be outraged and angry. (Hence the snarkiness displayed in this blog).

But to find such a bookas part of assigned reading, accompanied with worksheets, and tests, and grades, to be asked to chart the book's symbolism and fill in right answers seems deadly. The book...now constitutes "Official Knowledge."

Ultimately, I think, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Children are children, not miniature literary scholars; they will like adolescent power fantasies where lots of things blow up, or books wherein they go to magical worlds and ride telepathic ponies. And that's fine. It's what they want. And some of them want to read really dark-but-not-really-dark stories where they die beautifully of tuberculosis and then everybody's really sad that they weren't nicer while the deceased was alive. If you want them to actually enjoy reading, then you can't really force stories of abuse and hopelessness onto them, no matter how high in literary quality they are. But...if the kid likes her telepathic magical ponies, then she'll keep reading. And eventually she'll start to develop a better ear for formulaic plots and wooden characters, and be able to start appreciating something that better fits the literary establishment's idea of what constitutes a good book.

A brief anecdote. (Barbara Feinberg indulges in them, why shouldn't I?) I was in Japan for 10 months when I was 19, during which time I read virtually nothing in Japanese but comic books and their equivalent to trashy romance novels. I would start reading a good book, but then it would be too bleak and depressing. Which would've been okay, if it were in English... but in Japanese I can only manage 1/4 of my normal English reading speed, and to go through a depressing book sloooooowly is rather worse than going through it quickly. That was my first adult experience (indeed, one of my first memories) of being a nonfluent reader.
It reminded me that sometimes nonfluent readers need some really big incentive to keep reading books with big words and no pictures--incentive that often takes the form of wish-fulfilment fantasy.

And with that, I'm off to read my depressing book.