See What See You Yesterday Did There

Stories of time travel with branching possibilities emphasize the results of characters’ choices even more than other types of stories.

Furthermore, the way those stories end is inherently optimistic or pessimistic. They show that people can change their worlds, futures, or selves—or they show those people can’t.

[Since it’s impossible to discuss how stories end without SPOILERS, the remainder of this posting will not only not be SPOILER-free, it will be packed with extra SPOILERS.]

Back to the Future presents such an optimistic portrait of the universe that not only does Marty restore his family but without even trying he actually makes their life much better. In the sequels he also manages to repair the future and distant past.

Men in Black 3 doesn’t fix the losses of the past, but more knowledge of the past gives Agent J a happier present.

In contrast, Twelve Monkeys shows the hero unable to prevent the global catastrophe that leads to a dystopic future. From the same director, Terry Gilliam, Time Bandits ends on a sour note with its young hero orphaned and evil once again loose in the world. Something about free will, the Supreme Being doesn’t really explain.

See You Yesterday, a movie directed by Stefon Bristol and co-written by him and Frederica Bailey, is a time-travel story set in 2019 Brooklyn. Two high-school juniors, C.J. and Sebastian, have built a temporal displacement device as a science project. They have high hopes for college scholarships. The future looks bright.

Unfortunately, C.J. and Sebastian are also in the world where it’s necessary to say Black Lives Matter. Both crime and overpolicing constrict those African-American teens’ lives. Their experiments with traveling through time in their neighborhood end in the death of one character close to them, then another. No matter how many times they go back to the crucial day, someone ends up dead.

Finally, C.J. goes back on her own. And the movie ends with her running along a now-familiar alley. We don’t know if she succeeds is changing events. We don’t know if she can. By American entertainment standards, that’s a pessimistic ending. And a well considered one.

In an interview at the Decider, director Bristol said:

Often times when you have a tragic movie with a happy ending, people are like, “Well, all’s well that ends well.” I don’t want that. I want the audience to be uncomfortable. I want the audience to have their own interpretation of what’s happening with our country.

In other words, if we want this story to work out well for C.J., her family, her friends, and people like them, we have to fix this timeline ourselves.

No Justifiable Homicides for Superheroes

Recapping network television episodes seems to be big business for entertainment websites these days. I did it myself for Den of Geek and the first season of Turn.

For the new Flash series, Playboy evidently has the money to go straight to the top because the magazine’s recapper is Mark Waid, who wrote scores of highly regarded issues of that comic book and its spin-offs in the 1990s.

In his discussion of episode 3, Waid starts by analyzing a superhero trope that goes all the way back to when the genre was codified in the 1940s. He recaps his argument with an iconoclastic comic-book publisher about the rule against superheroes solving problems by killing bad guys:

Yes, there is absolutely such a thing as justifiable homicide, but it’s a last resort, not a method of operation. The concept that life in all forms is sacred isn’t just a throwback to fairy tales or simpler times, I argued; it’s a philosophy as old as realized religion.

Okay, yeah. Cops have to shoot robbers sometimes. Soldiers have to kill. Homicide detectives and private investigators, real or fictional, sometimes kill. They’re people just like you and me, with limited abilities and limited tools.

But super-heroes were created specifically, from the imaginations of the young and the young at heart, to do the impossible — to defy gravity or bounce missiles off their chest or outrun speeding bullets. It’s baked into their DNA. To find a perpetual audience, super-heroes must seem relevant and relatable and admirable, but they are still creations of fantasy.

We read their comics and watch their TV shows and movies to see them do the things we can’t, to triumph heroically against odds that would flatten you and me...not to suffer with them as they’re forced into the trauma of making the same real-world choices that you and I, mere humans, would have to make if we [were] caught helpless with our only available weapon one that was designed explicitly to kill.

To be sure, some costumed heroes, like Marvel’s Punisher and DC’s Vigilante, are specifically designed to go against the no-killing rule. But it’s notable that neither of those characters has fantastic powers. And the companies’ biggest brands avoid killing even if (as in the case of Wolverine) they talk about being willing to do it.

Waid’s faith in that dictum is what got him in trouble in viewing Man of Steel a couple of years back, as he so memorably described:

Superman wins by killing Zod. By snapping his neck. And as this moment was building, as Zod was out of control and Superman was (for the first time since the fishing boat 90 minutes ago) struggling to actually save innocent victims instead of casually catching them in mid-plummet, some crazy guy in front of us was muttering “Don’t do it…don’t do it…DON’T DO IT…” and then Superman snapped Zod’s neck and that guy stood up and said in a very loud voice, “THAT’S IT, YOU LOST ME, I’M OUT,” and his girlfriend had to literally pull him back into his seat and keep him from walking out and that crazy guy was me.

That crazy guy was me, and I barely even remember doing that, I had to be told afterward that I’d done that, that’s how caught up in betrayal I felt. And after the neck-snapping, even though I stuck it out, I didn’t give a damn about the rest of the movie.

And in that Waid was exactly right. Flash is not exhibiting the same problem.

Writing for “the Saddest Little Girl in the World”

Here’s Jimmy Gownley, author of the Amelia Rules! series, on the Comic Book Diner podcast a couple of years back, talking about his response to criticism that his comic for kids shouldn’t tackle tough emotional topics:

The trick, and this is the hokiest thing in the world and is completely corny and you guys will be like rolling your eyes, but I always picture like writing Amelia for one person: the saddest little girl in the world. Okay? . . .

You don’t know if she has any friends, you don’t know if she has any family or any money, but she’s, like, in a library, right? And she’s just miserable. And she has this book.

And so what am I going to say to her? Well, I want to say something that’s funny, hopefully. I want to say something that’s uplifting, ultimately. But I also want to say something that’s true, because false hope isn’t hope. It’s just a lie.

So that’s what I try to do. And the truth of the matter is that sometimes childhood is not “suitable for children.”

These remarks appear at about 42 minutes into podcast episode 50. I can’t find a link to that episode on the Comic Book Diner website, but cohost John Gallagher has a link here.

Editing Dahl

From Stephen Roxburgh’s recollections of editing Roald Dahl’s The Witches thirty years ago, just published in Publishers Weekly:

On May 16, I sent Roald our American copyeditor’s queries, three closely typed pages of minutiae, most of it involving using American English rather than British English. Roald wrote, “I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain.” Here are a few examples:

“elevator vs. lift: I agree elevator for ‘lift’ because most American children simply won’t know what ‘lift’ means.

“candy vs. sweets: I do not agree ‘candy’ for ‘sweet.’ Your children will know what sweets are and anyway it’s important for the witch to say “Sveet-shop.” So no candy or candy-shops, please.

“tuna fish vs. fish-paste: I won’t have ‘tuna fish’ for “fish-paste.’ Please keep this Anglicism. It’s a curiosity even over here.”

I’m pleased that even though Dahl began with a broad statement about “Americanisms,” he made his actual choices based on how well the text would communicate to young American readers.

Also notable in this article is that Dahl originally thought The Witches needed a more conventional ending, as forecast in its original beginning: “I myself escaped twice from the clutches of witches before I was eight years old, and for that I have to thank my grandmother.”

The Real Story of Horton the Elephant

When Dr. Seuss was asked about the genesis of his 1940 picture book, Horton Hatches the Egg, he usually told some variation on the story quoted here at Mental Floss:

I was in my New York studio one day, sketching on transparent tracing paper, and I had the window open. The wind simply took a picture of an elephant that I’d drawn and put it on top of another sheet of paper that had a tree on it. All I had to do was to figure out what the elephant was doing in that tree.

Charles D. Cohen’s “visual biography” of Seuss is titled The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss in part, I suspect, because it seeks to get to the truth behind such anecdotes.

When it comes to Horton Hatches the Egg, Cohen shows that:

• Seuss had drawn a whale up a tree for Judge magazine in 1927, a dachshund hatching a stork’s egg for Life in 1929, and a walrus hatching eggs in a tree for Judge in 1931.
  
• He had drawn elephants with wings for Life in 1930 and a book called Spelling Bees in 1937.
  
• He had drawn an elephant sitting on an egg for Life in 1934.

And in 1938 Judge published a one-page “Dr. Seuss Fable” titled “Matilda, the Elephant with a Mother Complex,” about a childless elephant who sits patiently on a chickadee egg, enduring the scorn of her fellow animals, until it hatches. Matilda didn’t go up a tree to do so, but clearly Horton Hatches the Egg had been gestating in Dr. Seuss’s mind for years rather than being inspired by a fortuitous breeze.

The really significant changes are that all those previous cartoons and stories had been for adult audiences, and almost all presented the odd mammal as misguided rather than heroic. The egg-sitting walrus was part of “The Truly-Dumb Animal Shoppe”; the first winged elephants were the product of delirium tremens; the elephant from 1934 cracked the egg’s shell.

As for Matilda, she managed to hatch the chickadee, but it took one look at her, “cried out in terror,…and flapped off frantically.” The moral of that story is: “Don’t go around hatching other folks’ eggs.” That, of course, is quite a different outcome from Horton’s pride at hatching an elephant-bird.

When Dr. Seuss went back to that idea as a recently-hatched children’s-book author, he was able to embrace the nonsense of the image of an elephant in a nest in a tree and create an ending that adults might know is unreal but which rewards Horton. For young readers, Dr. Seuss took his old elephant who defied convention and made him heroic rather than pathetic.

The Seuss, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Seuss analyzes other oft-told aspects of Dr. Seuss’s life as well, such as when and why he adopted pseudonyms and the critical response to The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It’s worth a look.

“The lessons they want to hand down”

The Horn Book just sent me editor Roger Sutton’s interview with Daniel Handler on the textual side of Why We Broke Up. I don’t think it’s yet on the web, so this might be a reminder to sign up for the Horn Book’s electronic newsletter.

In any event, at one point Handler (né for book-buying audiences Lemony Snicket) says:

I don’t quite understand what YA literature is. To me it’s the genre where the authors publicly talk the most about the lessons they want to hand down to the reader, even more so than in picture books, I’d say. It seems like everybody who's writing a book for a fifteen-year-old is trying to save a particular kind of fifteen-year-old from a particular kind of thing.

That’s just not true. There’s a whole ’nother kind of YA lit whose valuable lesson about life is reassuring a fifteen-year-old that others are going through a particular kind of thing just like them, so they don’t need saving.

(Unless, of course, the “particular kind of thing” is the adolescent belief that nobody is suffering just like them, that everyone else in high school is having more fun than they are.)

But does Why We Broke Up at the end offer a sense of hope?

A Different Standard for the Dust Bowl?

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is set in the Dust Bowl of the late 1920s and 1930s. It does a fine job of evoking that environmental catastrophe. I wasn’t so impressed with how the book’s plot was resolved, with a jump into the supernatural. The young hero appears to end the drought and fix his personal troubles in a way that the laws of nature made impossible for real children of that time and place.

Would reviewers be as quick to praise an equally fantastic treatment of other historic tragedies? In particular, I wonder about depictions of the Nazi Holocaust. Would critics, librarians, and teachers be as comfortable with a novel about that history that offers such an unreal resolution?

In The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen used the fantastic element of time travel to introduce a modern girl (and, through her, modern readers) to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. At the end, the heroine escapes being killed by traveling forward through time to her home. And that produced some objections.

In an editorial for the Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books in 1988, Roger Sutton praised aspects of The Devil’s Arithmetic but, as he’s acknowledged, “took issue with the fantasy aspect of the plot.” Specifically, he felt that ending undercut the historical reality:

Time-travel fantasy can be an honorable form of historical fiction, but how effective is it as an introduction to the Holocaust? . . .

Jane Yolen has written a powerful, not easily forgotten, story, but is it a story about the Holocaust? The horror—and the history—are betrayed by the essentially comforting vision of the story and its time-travel form. . . .

This optimistic, neatly rounded lesson fits comfortably into children’s literature, a genre that, despite well-known exceptions, demands a hopeful conclusion. How much hope can be extracted from the Holocaust?

I saw something similar in The Storm in the Barn. It offers hope for young Jack, and a sense of accomplishment he badly needs. But that comes about entirely at the fantasy level: Jack defeats the personification of the rain (who’s a rather easily defeated personification, as these things go) in a physical tussle atop a windmill.

More recently, many people objected to John Boyne’s fabulistic treatment of the Holocaust, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, because it, too, offered historically impossible hope. (Others loved the book for the same reason.) As of tonight the novel’s entry on Wikipedia argues:

it is not historical fiction. The very premise of the book - that there would be a child of Shmuel’s age - is, according to critics, an unacceptable fabrication that does not reflect the reality of life in the camps.

The Storm in the Barn is also a fabrication, even more obviously since one doesn’t need to look up histories to see the unreal elements. But no one has called Phelan’s book “unacceptable.” Indeed, it just received the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

The Dust Bowl and the Nazi Holocaust are separated by a decade at most, so I don’t think our different attitudes toward those events are based on how fresh their memories are. Instead, I can think of several other reasons for the difference, including:

• The lack of human villains in the Dust Bowl, meaning that the personification of the storm doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility.
• The lack of any small or vocal groups denying the severity of the Dust Bowl.
• America’s powerful agricultural and economic recovery after the Dust Bowl.

But what happens if climate change becomes a major problem in daily life? In that case, treating an environmental catastrophe as fodder for a fantastic fable might raise as many objections as those fantastic treatments of the Holocaust.

“Adult Anxieties in the Costumes of Innocent Make-Believe”

I rather liked what A. O. Scott wrote about the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are in the New York Times this Sunday:

No place is free of conflict and bad feeling, and no person has the power to make problems disappear. Where there is happiness — friendship, adventure, affection, security — there is also, inevitably, disappointment. That’s life.

When you stop to think about it, this is a pretty strong message, and not what you might expect from children’s entertainment. But at the same time, this kind of honest, realistic assessment of human relationships has gone missing from far too many supposedly grown-up movies, which are almost hysterical in their eagerness to dispense comfort, sentimentality and neat, tidy endings.

However violent or foulmouthed they may be, most of these commercial entertainments offer soothing scenarios of wish fulfillment. Justice is served. The bad guys pay. Love conquers all. The naughty boys come home from their crazy adventures and find that their mommies still love them. (That’s a plot summary of “The Hangover,” by the way, not of “Where the Wild Things Are.”)

But things are much more complicated in some children’s movies, it seems, where the regressive infantilism of grown-up comedies and action pictures is answered by a grave precocity. A movie like “Where the Wild Things Are”…play[s] a kind of reverse dress-up, disguising adult anxieties in the costumes of innocent make-believe and fanciful spectacle.

And by “rather liked,” I mean, “saw many points of agreement with what I said about the same topic.”

It’s interesting that books created to look like picture books for adults are often simplistic and maudlin, even compared to picture books for kids. Yet this movie for adults created to look like a kid’s movie is complex and troubling.

A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius

Of all the reviews I’ve seen about Spike Jonze’s movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most incisive comes from student dn in Monica Edinger’s class at the Dalton School:

Where the Wild Things Are is a good movie. The only problem is there is not an appropriate age to see this movie.

I take “appropriate age” as reflecting the idea that there’s a level of maturity at which one can relate to the emotions and milieu of a movie without also being troubled by them. And there’s no such age for children or adults because Where the Wild Things Are is a troubling movie.

Far more troubling than Maurice Sendak’s masterful picture book, which explores young Max’s wildness only to bring him, and his readers, back home. Of course a ten-sentence book must change to become a two-hour movie. But the movie’s story, fleshed out by Jonze and Dave Eggers, isn’t just a longer journey over the same path. It’s different in fundamental ways, producing a deeper and less reassuring work of art.

In the picture book, the Wild Things are reflections of Max’s wild mood. By taming them, exercising them, and finally leaving them behind, he gets himself back under control. Those Wild Things come in different shapes and colors, but they don’t have individual names or differentiated personalities. They’re wildness in general—Max’s own wildness in particular.

In contrast, the Wild Things in the movie have names: Carol, K.W., Alexander, and so on. And they have distinct personalities, broadly drawn. Some critics, such as Claire E. Gross at The Horn Book, interpret them as reflections of Max: “Each Wild Thing embodies a different aspect of Max’s psyche — his anger, loneliness, disaffection...” But that typology provides no place for officious Douglas or depressed and sniping Judith.

Carol, the most prominent Wild Thing in the movie, has the same problems as Max: feeling abandoned and lashing out. It’s only natural that they bond most closely. But Carol isn’t simply a manifestation of the boy’s angry mood; he’s a separate character. All the Wild Things are difficult personalities writ large, and beyond Max’s control.

As disconcerting as it might be, I think we have to consider the possibility that within the movie’s reality Max’s entire visit with the creatures occurs just as we see it. In the picture book, his bed and room clearly melts into being his boat and the sea, and he famously returns before his supper gets cold. The movie doesn’t provide the same sort of reassurance that the adventure is all pretend, taking place within Max’s psyche. From what we see and hear, he is really away for days on an island of monsters. Jonze is, after all, the director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, neither fully in the world we know.

In the book, Max chooses to leave the Wild Things because he gets homesick. It’s entirely his choice. In the movie, Carol turns against him, and he leaves in part out of fear, in part out of the realization that he can’t make the Wild Things’ lives perfectly happy, as he’d promised them—and himself—that he’d do. And that’s what so troubling. While the book’s Max controlled the fantasy land, the movie’s Max cannot.

Some critics make much of how some of Max’s early episodes of anger come in response to family tensions: his teenaged sister wanting to be with her older friends, his divorced mother having a boyfriend. But he also wears a wolf suit, rough-houses with the dog, and plays kill-the-man on the school playground with no link to those family frustrations. Max feels and acts wild at times like any nine-year-old boy; his family struggles just hurt the worst.

I think the ultimate lesson in Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is that such struggles will always be with us. Max can’t escape them in his family life. (What younger sibling doesn’t watch the older sibling become more distant?) And Max can’t shield his furry new friends from sadness, either. Their troubles arise from their own personalities, rivalries, and resentments.

We can’t make everyone’s life happy. All we can do is show our family and friends that we love them, whether by making a heart out of twigs or by serving warm soup, and hope that in the long run that’s enough.

That’s not the level of comfort we expect from a children’s film. Or from any genre film. But it’s the emotional experience we should expect from a work of art.

Not Directly about the Dust Bowl?

My favorite part in Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse’s Newbery-winning novel in verse about the Dust Bowl, is ****SPOILERS**** when the teen-aged heroine, Billie Jo, corners the embodiment of the Rain in an old barn and fights him into opening his carpet bag.

By releasing the thunder and lightning in that bag, Billie Jo forces the Rain back into his natural state and restores the landscape around her family farm. Although the book doesn’t say so explicitly, I think the return of the rain also means that Billie Jo’s sister won’t die of that lung disease.

Okay, that’s not what happens in Out of the Dust. It’s what happens in The Storm in the Barn, the new graphic novel by Matt Phelan.

In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo’s mother burns to death, the child she’s carrying also dies, Billie Jo’s own hands are so burned that she can no longer play the piano, and she runs away from home, only to turn back in order to end the book with the requisite sense of hope. (I told you there would be SPOILERS.)

In fact, if Hesse or anyone else had offered a literary novel about the Dust Bowl whose plot turned on fighting an embodiment of the Rain on top of a windmill, I suspect most reviewers would deem that story not serious enough for its setting and topic. Certainly critics have questioned whether children’s fantasy was an appropriate medium for addressing the Holocaust or other periods of great human suffering.

The Storm in the Barn’s plot doesn’t even include what I recall Ellen Howard calling “price of fantasy”: young Jack doesn’t have to make any trade-offs for how he benefits from magic. (Some might say that he and his family have already paid a price, however, and deserve a break.)

That fantastic, wish-fulfilling plot hasn’t stopped The Storm in the Barn from garnering rapturous reviews. Here’s a sampling of positive notices from Shelf Elf, A Fuse #8 Production, and Comics Should Be Good! And on a page-by-page basis it’s very affecting.

To be sure, The Storm in the Barn was created for somewhat younger readers than Out of the Dust. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy (action!) instead of a fourteen-year-old girl (feelings!). In the author’s note Phelan states, “I wanted this book to be set in the Dust Bowl but not a story directly about the Dust Bowl.”

I’m just asking, would that possible for a serious prose novel? Could someone writing for young people today create a novel set during, say, plantation slavery, but insist that it’s not directly about plantation slavery, offer a plot that ends the suffering of that system through supernatural means, and still gain reviewers’ praise?

TOMORROW: Fantasy and the comics form.

To Care About What Happens

From Lois Lowry's blog earlier this week:

I often receive emails from kids, usually for school assignments, with questions like "What did you intend for readers to get out of (title)?" or "What is the message of this book?"

And sometimes I sigh and try to reply with an answer that they can use in their term paper or exam. But what I really want to say is: I simply wanted the reader to enjoy the story. To love the characters. To care about what happens. To be scared, or sad, or angry, and to worry. To be excited in the middle of the book, and relieved at the end.

Discuss, with particular reference to the end of The Giver. Did you feel relieved? Did you feel a sense of hope?

(Tip from Jan Fields at the ICL.)

“Utterly Bound Up in the Medieval”?

The following passage appeared in the middle of Jill Lepore's article in The New Yorker earlier this summer on the dispute between Anne Carroll Moore, founder of the American children's library and head of the New York exemplar of the form, and Ursula Nordstrom, publisher of E. B. White's Stuart Little.

Children’s literature, at least in the West, is utterly bound up in the medieval, as Seth Lerer, a Stanford literature professor, argues in “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.” Lots of books for kids are about the Middle Ages (everything from “The Hobbit” to “Robin Hood” and “Redwall”), but the conventions of the genre (allegory, moral fable, romance, and heavy-handed symbolism) are also themselves distinctly premodern.

It’s not only that many books we shelve as “children’s literature”--Grimms’ Fairy Tales or “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Huck Finn”--were born as biting political satire, for adults; it’s also that books written for children in the twentieth century tend to be distinctly, willfully, and often delightfully antimodern. “The Phantom Tollbooth” has more in common with “The Pilgrim’s Progress” than it does with “On the Road.”

Hmm. Does this explain the abiding need for a "sense of hope"? Hope is even a character in The Pilgrim's Progress.

More seriously, I think it's notable that almost all the examples Lepore lists--everything except Robin Hood tales (which are medieval by necessity) and Huck Finn--have some element of fantasy.

We're not seeing the Middle Ages in Harriet the Spy or The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel or Captain Underpants or Little House on the Prairie. They and most other new children's novels, I dare say, are based on common forms of adult literature, adapted for younger readers' interests.

Rather than say that western children's literature is bound up in the Middle Ages, it might be more accurate to say that only in children's literature are books allowed to retain what smell like medieval traits: magic, allegory, moral lessons, talking animals. And, as a consequence, a book that exhibits those traits is more likely to be classified or treated as children's literature.

A Genre Novel—What Was She Sniffing?

Charles McGrath's article in Sunday's New York Times, headlined "Great Literature? Depends Whodunit," offers an amusing incident from British letters and a succinct definition of what sets genre fiction apart from other storytelling forms. McGrath wrote:

In a British court recently, an author said, in effect, that glue-sniffing had made her write a thriller. The author, Joan Brady, is a 68-year-old American who has lived in England for the last several decades and in 1993 became the first woman to win the Whitbread book prize. She received a £115,000 out-of-court settlement after arguing that fumes from the glue and solvents used in the Conker shoe factory next door to her home in Totnes had poisoned the air and made her sick. She suffered nerve damage, she said, and a loss of concentration that caused her to abandon the literary novel she was working on, Cool Wind From the Future, and instead crank out a potboiler called Bleedout. . . .

You also have to conclude that Conker or its lawyers don’t know much about the publishing business--that is, if they really believed that Ms. Brady had suffered from turning to thrillerdom. . . . [Bleedout] has done pretty well, selling some 50,000 copies in Britain alone since it came out in 2005. An author seeking damages would do better, one would have thought, by claiming to have become so addled that she had decided to forsake a certain payday for the vain hope of literary success. . . .

But what’s behind the Brady controversy, of course, is the assumption that genre fiction--mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories--is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be “serious.”

McGrath goes on to describe the genre writer's "implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails--whether it’s a murder solved, a cold war plot thwarted, a horror unmasked, a love requited." He concludes:

Such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not.

Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.

Now here's a question for the children's-lit field. There are, of course, genre books for young readers: mysteries, science-fiction adventures, sports books, going-to-camp books. But are there children's novels that come with no implicit contracts and expectations to fulfill?

Even the most serious and literary fiction for children is expected to leave readers with a "sense of hope." The young protagonist is supposed to grow and learn valuable lessons about life, at least a little. Does that recurring pattern make children's novels as a whole a sort of genre?

China, Tall Tales, and a Sense of Hope

So the night after I brought home Un Lun Dun from the library, Roger Sutton's post directed me to author China Miéville's recent essay in the Guardian:

There's nothing like the constant sage cliché that polemical politics has no place in fiction to make a person hanker for a bit of agit-prop. The cruder the better. Of course a lot of agitproppy art is crap, true, but then so's a lot of everything.

Irritated by the insipid and disingenuous separation of politics and art? Be reassured that it's never too early to corrupt young minds with tendentious reasoning smuggled into narrative. Fortunately, there's no shortage of political discussion in children's and YA fiction, sometimes camouflaged, often not.

In fact, I'll go further and note that children's and young-adult fiction is often judged by the values it imparts, far more often than serious adult literature. And what are politics if not values writ large?

Miéville went on:

The worst propaganda works aren't those (relatively few) books that actually do what the critics of political fiction claim it does (foreclose discussion and replace it with hectoring): they're those books which pretend -- perhaps to their authors too -- that they are above and unsullied by political concerns. What better way to naturalise all sorts of unexamined prejudices?

Unexamined prejudices like, say, the need to leave readers with a sense of hope. Which brings me to Mitali Perkins’s interview with our friend Karen Day, whose Tall Tales has just come out. Speaking of her editor, Wendy Lamb, Karen said:

She thought I left the family too vulnerable and wanted to see a happier outcome. She said she’d look at the novel again if I made these changes, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be realistic. I couldn’t see how to change it and stay true to my realistic conception of the novel. I fretted over this for months until finally I found a solution that satisfied me but also, I hoped, would satisfy Wendy.

As I've said before, there's nothing wrong with giving young readers a sense of hope. Tall Tales is a hard-hitting picture of a troubled family, so it's natural to want better for those kids. But it's worth examining whether our culture has a prejudice about how children's books must end. Does our model of the modern "problem novel" function like the books Miéville discusses, which claim not to be political yet reflect and reinforce unexamined political beliefs?

Seeking a Sense of Hope at the Oscars

Earlier this week I remarked on how the Newbery Medal (granted this week) and the Oscars (nominees announced this week) both tend to go to Serious work, as our culture defines it. Pirates of the Caribbean movies don't win Best Picture Awards, even when they’re very, very good.

I also opined that this year’s Newbery honorees match most other current Serious children’s novels in offering a “sense of hope.” That doesn’t mean the protagonists succeed at all they’ve set out to do, but the books end with those young people (and, presumably, young readers) looking up again at the road ahead. Does the same apply to Serious movies these days? Or are movies for adults (like novels for adults) able to leave their audiences with feelings of resigned acceptance, ennui, cynicism, fatalism, etc.?

Now whenever we consider how books or movies leave their partakers, we have to talk about how they end, so this posting will be nothin’ but *** SPOILERS ***.

Let’s consider The Depahted. (I use the indigenous pronunciation out of respect for my Boston neighbors.) What “sense of hope” does that movie leave us with? That a rogue ex-cop can exact revenge for his colleagues and escape his past as a white rapper? That Alec Baldwin is still alive and available for 30 Rock? That a really great Beacon Hill apartment has suddenly come on the market? That's not much hope.

And yet The Depahted is considered one of the more commercial, crowd-pleasing movies in this Best Picture lineup. For one thing, it's in English, almost. It has a lot of plot twists and gunshots. But it sure doesn’t end with assurance that all is well.

For adults, it seems, catharsis can be enough to complete a story. Plot resolutions don’t have to be wrapped up with a hopeful ribbon. As for the road ahead, it would be hard to imagine a movie in which more major characters end up dead. But then there’s Letters from Iwo Jima. (And, I suppose, Hamlet.)

The Queen is a terrific drama or social comedy, depending on your mood, but it’s like visiting your grandparents and realizing how you accommodate all their strange habits just because they’re your grandparents. At the end I felt closer to all the main characters, but I felt no hope that any of them can become better people.

I think Babel is a “sense of hope” movie in the most modern sense, making the case for global connections even in the face of global divides. And the comedy Little Miss Sunshine certainly throws hope at viewers: reassurance that when you put your little daughter in a hotel room with your junkie father, he may die but she’ll still learn to dance like a stripper when it counts. But of the five Best Picture nominees, I think a majority don't offer a “sense of hope” as a main ingredient.

That’s not to say that Oscar-winning movies are less bound by traditions and expectations than children’s literature. Indeed, as I noted before, I think the tradition of honoring mostly Serious work is even stronger in cinema than in kids’ books. But at least right now movies for grown-ups aren’t measured by their “sense of hope.”

Hunting for that crucial "sense of hope"

If I ever need a "sense of hope," I know where to hunt for it: in children's books. If you listen to lots of authors and illustrators talking about their work, it seems like no book can go without.

Author Jane Kurtz:

"So I'm happy if readers take away a sense of hope--and a better understanding of what life is like in different time periods and different places from the ones they themselves inhabit."

Author-illustrator Jan Brett:

"She tries to impart a sense of hope and a sense that children are capable of triumphing over problems."

Author Marty Kaminsky:

"Looking to instill a sense of hope in America's youth, Kaminsky chronicles the lives of 15 athletes who overcame adversity to achieve their goals."

Author Janet Lee Carey:

"The trick is to face the story problem head on and still give the reader a sense of hope."

Author Jenny Robson:

"Jenny believes that a children's book 'must give a sense of hope, of some faith in the future, some belief in some basic goodness'."

Does anyone look for a "sense of hope" with more avidity than children's writers and artists? Of course! Reviewers, critics, and those all-important award committees seem to emphasize that quality even more.

Newbery committee head Susan Faust on Cynthia Kadohat's Kira-Kira:

"What's really compelling here is the quietude of the book, in that there's both pathos and humor, and I think the book kind of radiates a sense of hope from the inside out."

School Library Journal on Karen Hesse's Letters from Rifka:

"Countering the misery and uncertainty are the main character's courage, determination, and sense of hope as well as the happy ending."

Education World on Rodman Philbrick's The Last Book in the Universe:

"It is worth noting that despite the dismal world of the Urb to which Spaz returns, there is a sense of hope at the end of the book."

Resource Library Magazine on illustrator David Diaz:

"Two themes appear consistently in books illustrated and/or written by David Diaz: a sense of hope--even when dealing with social issues fraught with controversy--and a strong and kind mother figure."

Publishers Weekly on author Sharon Flake:

"Sharon Flake raises important issues about self-awareness for African Americans and leaves readers with a sense of hope."

The Governor-General's Award committee on Tim Wynne-Jones's The Maestro:

"This sensitive, imaginative young man has tremendous, strength which invests the conclusion with a tangible sense of hope."

Leonard S. Marcus on author-illustrator Ezra Jack Keats:

"His work has a core of honesty, always leaving children with a sense of hope."

Kirkus on Julie A. Swanson's Going for the Record:

"...this intense story portrays a father’s death in painful detail, balanced with a sense of hope."

The ALAN Review on author John H. Ritter:

"So, what memories, experiences, and events serve as a backdrop for John H. Ritter as he paints literary images that later become powerfully written novels? Novels that not only address our human imperfections, but also leave readers with a sense of hope."

CM Archive on Monica Hughes's A Handful of Seeds:

"Hughes, an experienced story-teller, gently leads the reader through the story, imparting a sense of hope to the younger reader newly faced with this ugly side of the world."

Disability Studies Quarterly takes issue with one book, Jan Needles's My Mate Shafiq, for not offering young readers enough hopefulness :

"...the ending of Needle's novel shows 'hope' at a low premium. 'Realism' is identifiable with sadness. The sense of hope is lacking in this novel: the children 'cope,' but as regards disability there is no sense of any greater understanding, inner growth or liberation. The disabled mothers are a 'problem,' although sympathetically viewed."

(How, I wonder, is having a mentally disabled mother not a "problem" for a young child?)

Myself, I got nothing against hope. I like it. There's probably a "sense" of it in most of the fiction I write, too. So why do I bring up this pattern?

First, I never see the "sense of hope" yardstick being applied to literary fiction for adults. People don't say that Graham Greene or Margaret Atwood or Ralph Ellison should always leave their readers with a sense of hope. What if you were M. T. Anderson and you want to express the attitude: "Yes, I do have hope. Not for the human race--we're doomed--but for the Insect Overlords who will follow us"? (This is from Anderson's Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor acceptance speech for Feed. I quote the version of Ayelle's journal, which is a pretty good match for my own memory of the event. In a better world, this speech would be on YouTube.)

Second, I question whether it's an appropriate goal for so many stories--indeed, the way some people address it, for the entire field of children's literature. For example, in 2003 Gary D. Schmidt questioned whether the "sense of hope" approach is appropriate for books about the Holocaust. His review essay in The Lion & the Unicorn says--

"When a child reads a book about the Holocaust--particularly in a pedagogical setting--the adults around that child may assume certain purposes are at play. . . . There is the context of a hopeful ending, even if not a conventionally happy ending--the narrator or protagonist may experience hell, but will survive, and may emerge triumphant, or even still naively innocent. . . . Is a hopeful ending appropriate, even given the audience, or does such an ending almost mock the choicelessness of the victims?"

As we consider those hopeless questions, I invite people to report more spottings of the wandering sense of hope in the world of children's literature.