On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of
their characters.
The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of
high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of
innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than
I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are
confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from
innocence to experience, naivete to maturity, earlier. But even those of us
who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the
harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common
such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross
country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the
one who read John Knowles’ A
Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The
Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond
the Chocolate War (1985) in 8th grade.
I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s
about 25 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do
remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and
symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene
purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to
Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing
suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective
of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for
his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the
first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read
Agatha Christie’s Ten
Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but
they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least
in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in
Katherine Paterson’s Bridge
to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).
Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that
led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as
hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with
what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue)
mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their
interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which
they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II toward the
end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all,
certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that
direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic
ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading
of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such
effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case.
Next fall tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall,
you’d share?
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