Why Teachers Love Depressing Books

Thursday, August 26th, 2004

I guess I was fortunate enough to dodge the “problem novel” phenomenon — until high school, at least. From Why Teachers Love Depressing Books:

An avid reader growing up, I decided that there were two types of children’s books: call it ”Little Women” versus ”Phantom Tollbooth.” The first type was usually foisted on you by nostalgic grown-ups. These were books populated by snivelers and goody-two-shoes, the most saintly of whom were sure to die in some tediously drawn-out scene. When the characters weren’t dying or performing acts of charity or thawing the hearts of mean old gentlemen, they mostly just hung around the house, thinking about how they felt about their relatives.

The people in the other kind of book, however, were entirely different. They had adventures.

Miller is reviewing Barbara Feinberg’s Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up:

Feinberg, who runs an arts program for kids, was provoked to write this unusual hybrid of memoir and polemic by the trials of her 12-year-old son, Alex. She had seen him steel himself, again and again, for the joyless task of completing the assigned reading for his ”language arts” class, and she decided to investigate how those books could so oppress a boy who otherwise happily gobbled up Harry Potter novels and anything by or about his idol, Mel Brooks.

Her curiosity plunges Feinberg into the contemporary genre of young adult (Y.A.) ”problem novels,” the bane of her son’s existence. These books describe, with spare realism, child and teenage protagonists weathering abuse, addiction, parental abandonment or fecklessness, mental illness, pregnancy, suicide, violence, prostitution or self-mutilation — and often a combination of the above. ”Teachers love them,” the local librarian explains as Feinberg scans a shelf of such titles. ”They win all the awards.”

Most of the books chosen by the English committee at Alex’s school are problem novels, and the curriculum proves inflexible. ”We can’t ever say we don’t like the books,” Alex tells his mother, because, according to his teacher, ”if you’re not liking the books, you’re not reading them closely enough.” The books are so depressing — ” ‘Everybody dies in them,’ he told me wearily” — Alex insists on reading with his bedroom door open.

I can distincting recall asking a girl classmate in sixth grade about the book she was reading, Flowers in the Attic. I was pretty much horrified by her synopsis; here’s how Ingram, the book distributor, summarizes it:

Upon their father’s tragic death, Cathy and her three siblings are ensconced in the attic of their hateful grandparent’s mansion, unaware that their deceitful mother is planning to keep their existence secret forever.

“Ensconced” doesn’t sound as bad as “locked up,” and the Ingram summary doesn’t mention incest.

Anyway, this is what an 11-year-old girl was reading for fun.

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