Balancing Humor and Trauma in Middle-Grade Fiction
The preteen years are filled with contradicting emotions, both good and bad, that are inescapable parts of the experience of adolescence. Here, author Mark Goldblatt discusses balancing humor and trauma in middle-grade fiction.
I’ve always thought of myself as a college professor who writes middle-grade fiction on the side, so I hope, as the sun sets on my academic career, you’ll forgive me a brief, lecture hall intro:
Imagine a world of clockwork justice, a world in which doing the right thing meant getting an immediate reward and doing the wrong thing meant getting struck by lightning. No one would do wrong in such a world; there’d be no point since you’d turn around and get struck by lightning. You’d have justice, in other words, but you wouldn’t be free. You’d be doing the right thing because you were being compelled to do it. You’d be a creature of instinct rather than reason, in T.S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
Injustice must exist in order for freedom to exist. Bad things have to happen to good people, and good things to bad people; that’s what provides us with a menu of moral options. This is the standard philosophical solution to the problem of evil. Wrong must occasionally triumph, unwarranted suffering must occasionally come, evil must exist because the world is a place of soul-testing. Human freedom wouldn’t be possible in a universe of relentlessly predictable good and bad outcomes.
Whether you regard the Eden narrative in Genesis as revelation or myth, that’s the only way to make sense of the fact that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, benevolent God puts temptation—in the form of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—in the center of the Garden. Adam and Eve must walk past it each day. They have to decide each day to do the right thing or the wrong thing. Without that choice, God would have created a pair of ragged claws rather than a pair of human beings.
The problem of evil is never far from my mind when I write a middle-grade novel. Yes, I know how grandiose that sounds. But consider the protagonists. They’re characters in the process of becoming moral agents; their consciences are quickening into their final forms. Middle-grade fiction is, as far as I’m concerned, a genre of soul-testing. (A reviewer called one of my earlier novels “Dostoevsky for kids,” which I like a lot.) One of the milestones in our moral growth is when we start doing the right thing because it’s the right thing—rather than because we may get punished if we don’t. Regardless of the particulars of plot, for me, that’s the main drama in writing about tweens.
That means that every middle-grade novel I write is going to be funny-sad. It’s going to be funny because the first job of a novelist is to entertain his readers … and, let’s face it, when your main characters are dealing with rapidly changing bodies, negotiating social hierarchies, and eyeing romantic partners for the first time, they’re inevitably going to step on a few rakes. Is there a more cringeworthy period of life than your early teen years?
So, if my books don’t make you laugh from time to time, you deserve a refund. But since they’re also focused on the evolution of conscience, their plots are inevitably driven by emotional crises. Twerp, my first middle-grade novel, is about a kid who’s assigned to write about a horrific bullying incident in which he participated, but who’s so desperate to avoid the topic that he fills up notebook after notebook recounting every goofy thing going on in his life—except that one incident. When he finally does address it, you witness the precise moment his conscience kicks in.
Twerp’s sequel, Finding the Worm, finds the same cast of characters coming to grips with mortality as their friend struggles with childhood cancer. Not just any of their friends however … the most beloved among them. Preparing for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, they’re plagued by the question of why God would allow such a thing to happen.
My latest, Might As Well Be Dead, tells the story of David Salmon, whose mother has deserted him and his father—and who, as a consequence, has closed up shop emotionally. He’s numb, and he’s turning more and more inward, which means withdrawing from his friends and family, when he meets (or begins to hallucinate) the ghost of John Lennon. Why Lennon? He too was deserted by his mom and carried the scars of that trauma with him throughout his life. You only have to hear the Beatles song “Julia”—which Lennon wrote about his mother—to realize that the pain never went away.
That doesn’t mean that David spends the entire book swimming through a vale of tears. He’s a kid—a traumatized kid, to be sure, but still a kid. He’s got mental health issues, as he himself suspects. The possibility that he’s hallucinating is not an insignificant matter. But he’s also got the usual kids’ stuff going on. Best friend problems. First girlfriend problems. Even history quiz problems. (Remembering who wrote Common Sense is a Paine in his butt.) So, he's got lots of distractions. He just happens to be wrestling with the same question Job wrestled with millennia ago: Why did this thing happen to me?
What, then, is the responsibility of a novelist writing for young readers who takes perennial philosophical questions, including the reality of human suffering, as his subject matter? Maybe just this: He should provide the imaginative vocabulary for a lifetime of pursuing answers.
Mark Goldblatt is retiring this semester from Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York. His latest book is Might As Well Be Dead.
