A Shot of Story… with a Controversy Chaser
It’s the books – adult or YA – with that little kick of scandal, power to stir, the gift to get tongues wagging, that you remember the longest.
The power of controversy was illustrated not that long ago by the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey (yeah, you reemmber that one, don’t you?) The author, Frey, scored the highest possible publicity coup that an author in America can get today – he landed on Oprah’s show to discuss the book. She lauded it, gave it her stamp of approval… and then the scandal broke when the “memoir” was revealed to be, well, um, not, um, quite, you know, what actually happened. Oprah pointed a trembling finger and breathed, “You LIED!”
Did the book sales drop? No, they jumped. I walked into my local indie bookstore not too long after the Oprah denouncement only to find Frey’s book prominently displayed on the shelves as a big seller.
Oh, but then the furor died down.
So they rekindled it.
Oprah apologised.
Gues what’s going to happen next? Can you hear the cash registers ringing?
Kids’s books aren’t so much banned for lying about things as for telling the kind of truth that some people find acutely uncomfortable.
The winner of the 2007 Newberry Award (that’s like the Nobel Prize for kidlit) was a book called “The Higher Power of Lucky”, by Susan Pantry – a public librarian. The book featured a word which made a slew of public-minded school librarians fly into a tizzy and ban the books from school library shelves. No, the word wasn’t a four-letter word, or swearing, or anything remotely inapporpriate as such. No. The controversy arose about the fact that Pantry’s protagonist happens to note the existence of a dog’s scrotum, and called it by name. Not even because of any salacious intent whatsoever – it happens to be the part of the dog’s anatomy that is relevant to the subject currently under discussion at the time in the book. But oh, the storm in that teacup – an actual word which applied to a part of the human body that we’d like to keep under wraps crept into the text of an award-winning book, and suddenly it did not matter in the least that the award was one given for young readers’ literature – there was the issue of “appropriateness”, and what it was or was not appropriate for our children to know.
The years have passed and so, apparently, has the storm. But I do remember wondering, at the time, whether I should introduce the word “scrotum” into my own YA novel… just to see if I could get a similar rise out there.
Books are banned or challenged in schools and libraries all the time – there is now a Banned Books Week to celebrate these volumes, and you can purchase merchandise that proudly proclaims, “I read banned books!” And why not? Titles banned or challenged in recent years include household names and true classics. Here’s a sampling:
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
Colfer, Eoin. The Supernaturalist.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass.
Meyer, Stephenie H. Twilight Series.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Baron, T. A. Child of the Dark Prophecy.
Judy Blume, Forever
The reasons given range from “sexual content” – even if teens have seen more sex on TV than could possibly be packed between the covers of a YA book – to “race/gender issues”, to “deals with the occult”. In other words, mostly things that make the PARENTS uncomfortable – it took an adult mind to call Noddy “gay”, and therefore objectionable. And it only takes one parent with a mission for the books to start their journey on the Banned Book path.
But take heart – look at some of those titles, some of those authors. They’re classics, old and new; some of them have been selling for generations, others, newer ones, are going to be doing the same thing as the kids of the kids who were banned from reading them re-discover the “forbidden” literature of their elders.
Some of the most banned and challenged of all YA books, ever, have been the seven books of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. All of them. All of the time. Constantly. Why?
Elizabeth Kennedy, in “Harry Potter – The Censorship Battles”, writes:
“Depending on who you talk to, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are either wonderful fantasy novels with powerful messages for kids, or they are evil books designed to promoted an interest in the occult since Harry is a wizard…. The latest challenge began in Gwinnett County, Georgia, where a parent challenged the Harry Potter books on the grounds that they promoted wichcraft. When school officials ruled against her, she went to the state Board of Education. When the BOE confirmed the right of local school officials to make such decision, she took her battle against the books to court. Although the judge ruled against her in the spring of 2007, she has indicated she might continue her fight against the series.”
Last I looked, Georgia has not been inundated by a gaggle of young witches waving tiny wands and chanting “Wingardium Leviosa!” Very few spells have been cast. Really. But boy, is the torch-burning mob of outraged villagers kindling not the books themselves but the sheer enthusiasm for them! For most young readers of average to superior intelligence and curiosity, a blanket “Thou Shalt Not Read This”, particularly when accompanied by nothing stronger than “Because I said so!”, is tantamount to making the reading of that banned material essential. Nothing attracts like forbidden fruit. I wonder if therre WERE any kid readers of Potter who were actually disappointed that they didn’t turn into a tiny wizard or witch themselves after dutifully reading Rowlings’ increasingly weighty tomes.
But even the witchcraft controversy gets old after a while – there are only so many times you can point to something not happening and try and claim it was because you “pre-emptively” banned the book in question. Something new was needed. And Rowling seems to have an excellent sense of timing for controversy. Just as the Pottermania was beginning to wind down, with no more new Potter books on the horizon, she turned to a packed audience at Carnegie Hall and revealed that DUMBLEDORE WAS GAY. She added, after the revelation, “You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! …Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?”
All new ammunition for the controversy-chasers. Now we had not only witches on the loose, but gay wizards, too, and surely, SURELY that had to be bad for the children’s morals?
Can you hear those cash registers ringing…?
There are other controversies out there, some of them focused on matters potentially far more “real” than a fantasy wizarding world. One of the latest kerfuffles to blow up in the blogosphere is the so-called “mammothfail” discussion concerned with Patricia Wrede’s new book, “The Thirteenth Child”. Pat Wrede wrote a novel which she described at one point as “Frontier Fantasy with Mammoths” – it was a fantasy “Little House on the Prairie” but instead of Native Americans Wrede populated her North American continent with woolly mammoths and other extinct beasties. The Native American tribes who would usually have made that place their home were noticeable by their absence.
The blogosphere exploded with outrage. Wrede had written a book that “denied the existence of an entire race”, and was therefore a Bad Evil writer who had a Hidden Agenda and had written the book in order to apparently erase a subset of the human race from the face of the earth. But the book to which her novel initially alluded, the “Little House of the Prairie” of beloved memory to many, had its own very serious issues – I read a review of it by someone who was descended from one of the Native American tribes from whom, essentially, the Ingalls family stole their homesteading land. In that reality-based story, the Indians were just as “vanished” as in Wrede’s book – because they did not MATTER in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s world. But her book was given to kids to read – and generations of them loved it to bits.
Wrede chose not to take the all-too-real issues of the Native American population – as we know them today – into her what-if fantasy world, and her avoiding the issues seems to be treated as far worse than Ingalls’s whitewashing of them.
I suspect that Wrede didn’t go that route not because she wanted to hurt anybody at all but because the issues that would otherwise have had to be addressed would have probably been beyond the scope of a YA novel of the ilk that she was writing – and if she had tried to address them in an appropriate manner there would have been somebody who would have objected on the grounds that she was being too graphic, or that she was stereotyping her Native American characters, or that she was making every Native American character a “magic Negro” shaman who could come along and wave a hand and make everything all better. Wrede’s “pioneer” family came from a magic-wielding world, where everybody wielded magic. Her choices, had she included the Native American population, would have been one worse than the next – she could have had that segment of the population have no magic at all compared to the settlers (raising the question, why not them if everyone else?), or she could have had them possess different magic to the settlers (which, if the settlers’s magic defeated it in a game of magical rock-paper-scissors context, would have begged the question as to why the Native magic was inherently weaker than the settlers’ magic – and if it was not weaker, then how come the settlers won…?) The issues are many, and complex, and there probably isn’t a right answer other than not to write anything at all – but also, here, there is a shot of story with a chaser of controversy. A lot more people have now heard of “The Thirteenth Child” than might have done had Wrede courted no controversy at all, whether consciously or accidentally. One wonders if the Potter Effect will step in and take the matter to an obvious conclusion.
So – some books are controversial because of manufactured drama, some because of any number of genuine issues that arise from them (to paraphrase a statement about greatness which seems to apply, some books are born controversial, and some have controversy thrust upon them…)
How do YOU feel about controversy in books, particularly in books for yournger readers? What really matters to you in books like these? What would be the thing that would make YOU draw the line if you were choosing a book for a young reader of your own?
What sins are unforgivable? And what kind of storm in a teacup is simply a stir-up to gather interest and reader passion, and let the wind blow where it will…?
Selected Bibliography:
James Frey, “A Million Little Pieces”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1897924,00.html
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Pantry
http://www.readersread.com/cgi-bin/bookblog.pl?bblog=220071
http://ecochildsplay.blogspot.com/2007/02/newberry-controversy.html
Banned Books, Children’s Literature
http://childrensbooks.about.com/od/censorship/tp/bannedbooks.htm
Harry Potter
http://childrensbooks.about.com/cs/censorship/a/banharry.htm
The Thirteenth Child
http://ilya1.livejournal.com/143228.html
