Junie B. Jones and the mushy, gushy vernacular

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Yesterday, in its ThursdayStyles section, the New York Times ran a piece by Anna Jane Grossman about parents who are upset about the use of misspellings and improper grammar in Barbara Park’s popular “Junie B. Jones” series for young readers. In case you’re among the uninitiated, Junie B. Jones is a first-grader with attitude, a good kid who can’t help getting in trouble on occasion and definitely has a hard time sitting still. Children love her; according to the Times, the 27 Junie B. books have more than 43 million copies in print.

And yet, this article informs us, there is now a backlash among some parents because the character, who narrates her own stories, doesn’t use grammatical English or even (necessarily) proper words. “In 2004,” Grossman writes, “Park was selected as one of the American Library Assn.’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck.”

Can we be blunt? This is ridiculous, a fundamental misapprehension about how reading and writing work. Books do not exist to teach us proper grammar but to draw us into an experience, to share with us a piece of the world. As it happens, our cover piece in this Sunday’s Book Review is about the very same issue: Chris Abani reviews the anthology “Rotten English,” which gathers 200-plus years of vernacular literature. The idea, Abani argues, is that the language, and by extension the literary canon, is in a constant state of evolution, transformed and broadened by outsider voices and forms. Mark Twain wrote in vernacular, as did William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, even Chaucer and Shakespeare. Without vernacular, in other words, we wouldn’t have an English language or a literature.

As for Junie B.? “I think she’s in kindergarten and first grade,” my 8-year-old daughter says, “and she should talk like that.” I agree. But more to the point, we ought to stop looking for reasons to take books away from kids. It’s hard enough, in a culture that offers endless flashier entertainments, to convince young readers that books are a viable outlet for their curiosity. When we find a book that resonates with our children, shouldn’t we just get out of the way?

David L. Ulin