Unhappily Ever After

In the fictional world of author Robert Cormier, there are no positive role models. No friendly adults willing to lend a helping hand to teens. No happy endings.

This is a good thing, the author for young adults insists, because it’s real--and kids know it.

“I get an awful lot of mail from my readers, and I get phone calls,” said Cormier, 73, whose 17th novel, “Heroes” (Delacorte Press), is due in August. “The kids say, ‘You tell it like it is.’ ”

Over the past two decades, Cormier has steadily produced stories about children on the cusp of maturity who fight lonely battles against big, heartless institutions and lose. His groundbreaking 1974 novel, “The Chocolate War” (Pantheon), shocked and angered some adults because its schoolboy protagonist ultimately gave up after challenging not only his bully classmates, but also the corrupt priest who ran the private school.

The book was nearly banned in some communities and still appears on People for the American Way’s list of censorship targets around the country, but it opened the door for a new field of authors now busily plumbing the bleakness of teenagers’ lives. The five finalists for last year’s National Book Awards for young people all featured stories about dysfunctional families: a 13-year-old girl describing the murder of her lover, who was her mother’s employer; a girl who suffers a mental breakdown after realizing her father is a fraud; a boy dealing with an abusive father whom he adores; an interracial friendship between two girls with unsupportive families; a baby raised by animals who do a better job than the parents.

British writer Melvin Burgess won his country’s Carnegie medal for his novel “Smack” (Henry Holt & Co., 1998), about two teenagers’ addiction to heroin.

Pursuing themes of evil and violence, Cormier has also written about a young boy imprisoned and driven mad by government agents who killed his whistle-blowing parents; an 18-year-old serial killer and his adoring girlfriend; and, most recently, a disfigured young war hero determined to kill the charismatic youth leader who raped his girlfriend.

Telling Truths, Not Lies

Although Cormier’s books have won many awards and are taught in some schools, some parents and even members of the literary community complain that such dark themes in children’s literature are inappropriate because they shatter innocence, lack hope and promote nihilism.

“Everyone wants to protect children; we just disagree on the means,” said UCLA library and information science associate professor Virginia Walter, who just published her own dark novel for young adults, “Making Up Megaboy,” which is about a middle-class 13-year-old who shoots a liquor store owner. “People in our field think we give them some facts, some values and good questions, and that gives them armor for dealing with the dangers of their times.

“If there’s no hope,” she said, “at least there’s no false hope, which is worse.”

Cormier, during a recent visit to Los Angeles, further defended grim topics for young readers because they reflect the lack of control and respect experienced by most teenagers throughout history.

“Being a teenager or adolescent is really a devastating time of life, and I think a lot of people don’t realize it because it’s transient,” he said. “We tell young people, ‘Things will get better.’ ”

But it’s obvious to almost every teenager that that can’t always be true.

“Kids see their father come home from work saying, ‘Some rat at work got the promotion I should have had.’ They see their mother frustrated. They see that life isn’t filled with happy things,” Cormier said. “When you’re giving them books with happy role models, you’re telling them lies.”

Slight and snowy-haired, Cormier speaks directly, with a twinge of Kennedy twang, signs of his New England heritage. A former newspaper reporter and columnist for 30 years, he writes daily at his home in Leominster, Mass., where he was born and raised. He and his wife, Connie, have four adult children who live nearby and visit often.

It was only six years ago, after his mother died, that Cormier began to explore where all the darkness in his work came from, he told a Los Angeles audience last week as the guest speaker for UCLA’s annual Frances Clarke Sayers lecture. Born into a large and loving family with eight children, he was a sensitive child haunted by early observations of death--first his brother who died of pneumonia at age 3, then a cousin who also died young and was afraid of being buried alive. And then a friend who died in a fall from a cliff.

In an interview, Cormier said he never set out to write unhappy books. Rather, he chooses stories--taken from his own life or the news--that affect him emotionally.

“I follow the inevitability of events,” he said. “The topics that attract me are the ones I’m emotionally upset about, so, to begin with, the plot isn’t a happy one. It’s hard to force a happy ending on it.”

He said seven major publishers turned down “The Chocolate War” because he refused to make the ending more positive.

Ahead of His Time

Michael Cart, president of the Young Adult Library Services Assn., said Cormier’s unhappy endings were 20 years ahead of their time. Many writers now believe that traditional literature sometimes does a disservice to young readers by holding out a skewed vision of a happy world awaiting them. He said that as a result of his own childhood reading, he grew up with the mistaken ideas that hard work would guarantee success, that there would always be someone out there to love him and make him happy.

While there is a place in literature for happy escapes from reality, Cart said, “if literature is going to have the capacity to change lives, it has to recognize the reality of kids’ lives today. Also, it’s not only for the kids whose lives are at risk, but it is for the privileged kids who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. They need to read about the lives of these kids so they will develop empathy and compassion.”

In a world dominated by TV and movies, literature for young adults is experiencing a renaissance, Cart said. Recognizing that young adults will soon constitute the fastest-growing age group, Cart said, some publishers and book chains are now taking small steps to court young adult readers with older protagonists (whose average age is now 17) and special sections for young adult books. Some music outlets are also creating book islands, he said.

As evidence that young adults are still moved by the written word, Cormier points to the thousands of phone calls he’s received over the years. It’s become an open secret that a phone number for a character named Amy in his novel “I Am the Cheese” (Pantheon, 1977), is actually Cormier’s home number.

“Boys say, ‘Hello, is Amy there?’ and I say, ‘No, but her father is,’ and this marvelous thing happens,” Cormier said. “A real person has called a fictional character, and the father of the fictional character answers.”

Only occasionally will he receive a call from a truly troubled child. Mostly, he said, they just want to “touch base” or ask questions about his complex plots. Once, a boy asked so many questions that Cormier wondered why. “He said, ‘I’ve got a test tomorrow.’ ”

Cormier said that as society’s institutions become increasingly large and impersonal, he holds little hope that children will be better served by them. He is heartened, however, by the teachers he often sees who ask him to sign books that they have bought students with their own money.

“Thank God there’s that teacher who cares, despite the budget,” Cormier said.

Despite his downbeat endings, he denied being a pessimist.

“I have to be an optimist in the first place to sit down and write a book and expect people to pay money for it,” he said. “How could a pessimist do that?”