PicoBlog

1952 medalist Ginger Pye is the heartwarming tale of a dog adopted by the two stupidest children in the world. The main conflict of the novel is that somebody kidnaps the Pye kids' dog (Ginger), and the only clue they have to go on is that the kidnapper was wearing a yellow hat. Then, two-thirds through the 306-page (306 pages!) novel, the Pye kids see the guy with the exact yellow hat and are just like "eh, it's probably not that guy" and it's totally that guy! You idiots! Your dog was gone for months!

"'I thought he had a yellow hat on, when I first saw him,' said Jerry.

'I did, too,' said Rachel.

'But he didn't have a hat on at all,' said Jerry.

'Unless he threw it in the bushes,' said Rachel.

'I didn't see him flip it off or pick it up or anything,' said Jerry, puzzled.

'You know what?' said Rachel. 'I think there is a secret society of mean people that wear funny yellow hats'."

Is that what you think, Rachel? You think there's a whole secret society of men with yellow hats? It's the guy that stole your dog, the guy who owns Curious George, and then this separate third guy? They just all live in your Connecticut town together in some sort of Full House situation? There is not, to be clear, any more to the book than this, besides author Eleanor Estes’ own illustrations, the most sophisticated one of which looks like this:

To drive home the point a little more about how behind-the-ball the Pye children are, we get an early bit of characterization on Rachel and Jerry and their love of reading, which, as it turns out, is limited to very specific kinds of books:

“It was a Friday evening and Jerry and Rachel had been sitting, reading, on the little upstairs veranda of their tall house. Rachel had The Secret Garden from the library, and Jerry had one of the Altsheler books, and neither one of these books was an ‘I’ book. They both always opened a book eagerly and suspiciously looking first to see whether or not it was an ‘I’ book. If it were they would put it aside, not reading it until there was absolutely nothing else. Then, at last, they would read it. But, being an ‘I’ book, it had to be awfully good for them to like it. Only a few, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson, for example, survived the hard ‘I’ book test. These were among their best beloved in spite of the obvious handicap.”

The Pyes don’t like reading stories that are narrated in the first person, which I personally consider a bigger handicap for the Pyes than first-person narration is to a children’s novel. So you know what, Jerry and Rachel? Now this is an essay about voice. You did this to yourselves.

Of the Newbery medalists we’ve read so far, here are the strongest when it comes to first-person voice: …And Now Miguel, where Joseph Krumgold learned how to write and think like a child scrabbling for attention in a big family by literally embedding himself with a child in a family of sheep farmers. Merci Suarez Changes Gears, told by an adorable sixth-grader who gets easily pissed off at her classmates. Walk Two Moons, narrated by a girl in serious denial over her mother's death. And, easily the best among them so far, The One And Only Ivan, the story told by a gorilla, written by the master of getting inside an animal’s head, K.A. Applegate. Part of the reasoning behind the narrative tactics in all of these books is pretty obvious: when you read the words of someone else telling their own story, when you are allowed to actually be in their head and hearing their thoughts and how they are assigning narrative meaning to their lives, you begin to think “oh, okay, this person thinks like I do sometimes. Other people are like me in how they think. I am not the only person in the world who possesses consciousness.” Those aren’t the words you would use as a child reader, but this is the very beginning of the most basic form of empathy, and you get there by learning that you are telling a story in your head about your life, and that other people can do that too. When you read Shiloh and hear the voice of Marty Preston, who may have come from a part of the country you’ve never visited and be in a completely different economic class than you can imagine, you see that his voice sounds a lot different than yours (or, put another way, that the world is bigger than you think), but that Marty can feel the same things you feel and think the same kind of things that you think (or, put another way, that you’re not alone in that world).

The One And Only Ivan is, of course, the most ambitious of these, and the best one, because of how Applegate pulls it all off. Ivan is a smart gorilla, but he’s still a gorilla. He’s still a creature with strong instincts, and he doesn’t have the same vocabulary as an accomplished and decorated children’s author, and on top of all of that, he’s spent his entire life getting beaten down into misery at a crappy strip mall. These are all limitations on Ivan’s ability to effectively narrate his own story - and be an agent of his own eventual rescue and liberation - and even though Applegate forces herself to narrate in short, abrupt sentences and sparse chapters, you start to see Ivan’s voice develop over time and earn the payoff at the climactic moment of the novel. She’s such a good writer, guys! She wrote a book narrated by a tree once! It was great!

Bold experiments in voice can quickly gain books notoriety and buzz, even in the current era. Think of Haddon's bestseller The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime, narrated by a teen on the autism spectrum, or Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, narrated by a guy who is shitty at writing novels. My personal favorite examples of voice in children's literature, though, are ones where the author uses voice for comedic effect. One of the best examples of this comes from a book series I've referenced before, John R. Erickson's Hank The Cowdog series, narrated by a ranch dog and self-proclaimed "Head of Ranch Security" who is not very bright. When I started reading novels to my first daughter in order to help her fall asleep, I loved reading Hank novels to her because I loved narrating as Hank. Hank, who describes his crusade against the mysterious "silver bird-monsters" that loudly fly over the ranch. Hank, who barked at the cliffs every night because some mysterious dog would bark back from the cliffs immediately after he stopped. Hank, who picked a fight with another dog and then shortly before the fight began, kept saying "you know, now that I saw him up close, he really was a very big dog. Bigger dog than I thought." This is just like Applegate, brilliantly revealing characters through the limitations of how they talk and think: Hank's limitation just happens to be that he's an idiot.

Hank is great, but this kind of humor doesn't even have to be in first-person voice: the dry humor of Ellen Raskin's narrator in previous selection The Westing Game, or the desperation of Jules Feiffer's narrator to hold everything together in A Barrel Of Laughs, A Vale Of Tears are great examples that I've cited before. But there's one other book from my junior high days, by one other author I read a lot in my junior high days, that also comes to mind:

I honestly don't think it was until I was 11 or 12 years old and started reading my dad's books by Dave Barry, staple of Dad Humor and the Pulitzer-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald (and whose column was syndicated nationally, including in the Chicago Tribune that came to our house), that I realized that you could simultaneously write stuff and be tears-to-your-eyes funny. Big Trouble, published in 1999, was his first novel after several successful books of essays, and was a madcap crime novel focused on a large ensemble of crazy people in Miami. If you’ve ever read any novels by a different Miami Herald columnist named Carl Hiaasen, it’s basically exactly like a Carl Hiaasen novel (which Barry himself acknowledges).

I read Big Trouble when I was in seventh grade. I loved it. It was my favorite novel of all time. It did not occur to me that it was one entry in a very popular genre that had existed for decades and was home to hundreds of novels. It was, to my, mind, a masterpiece of the English language. I recommended it to my friends at Mary Seat of Wisdom Elementary. There were so many characters and they were all so wacky! There was action and funny lines of dialogue! And, most importantly, the third-person omniscient narrator was clearly Barry himself, with the same style from all of my dad's books that left me rolling on the floor laughing, making deadpan asides that would unexpectedly veer into absurd exaggeration. The narrator was commenting on the characters and making fun of what they were saying! I didn't know books could do that! And two years later, my mind was blown again.

Big Trouble was also a 2001 film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and oh my God I was 14 and so excited for this. I went to the film’s promotional website and watched all of the interviews with the cast and with Barry about how he adapted his novel for the screen. I counted down the days. You look at the cast on that poster today and you're going to do a few double-takes. Okay, Tim Allen and Rene Russo are the leads, and there are a lot of reliable comedic character actors in there, like Janeane Garofalo, Patrick Warburton, Jason Lee, and Chicago legend Dennis Farina, in one of his few roles where he doesn't play a cop (he plays a hitman). But who else is on there? Is that Omar Epps from House? Is that…a teenage Zooey Deschanel? Johnny Knoxville is in this? Stanley Tucci plays…another hitman? For the hot lady they got a then-unknown actress named…Sofia Vergara?

But there’s something else on the poster that maybe made you do a double-take: the release date of September 21st, and, once again, this movie was supposed to come out in 2001. Unfortunately, a major plot point in Big Trouble - which was a pretty funny book at the time! - involved a suitcase nuke being inadvertently smuggled onto a commercial flight. In early September of that year, some other events happened that led the studio to suddenly pull the film, feeling that, for some reason, audiences would not be into a madcap PG-13 ensemble comedy about airplane terrorism on the evening of, again, September 21st 2001. The studio bigwigs assumed that audiences would not be ready for the zany antics and snarky Barry-inspired banter of Big Trouble. The release date was eventually pushed to the following April, the entire promotional plan was pulled, and I remember seeing it opening night in a theater in Normal, Illinois (real place, actually called that) and there were maybe four other people there. It opened against the Ryan Reynolds vehicle National Lampoon’s Van Wilder.

I’ve written three novels in my life (they were each self-published and the best-selling one sold 30 copies); all three of them were written in third-person omniscient voice. The third novel approximated something a little bit closer to a narrator with an actual point of view, because, by that point, I had gotten a little more comfortable figuring out the sort of writing that I liked doing. I am no Dave Barry, but his approach to novel writing and narrative voice still informs my writing today. It is a little weird to give you all of those examples of great novels with great first-person narrators and then realize that I’ve tried to write books before myself and never even attempted anything like this; none of the three novels, in any format from outline to finished product, was ever even considered for first-person narration. And I think that maybe, deep down, it’s because I’m scared I’ll do too good a job, sell the film rights to the next book, and then have the movie flop because another 9/11 happens.

In conclusion, Ginger Pye is a waste of time. I’ll tell you what’s not a waste of time, is this essay that you just read and I just wrote where all of us definitely had a clear idea of where things were heading.

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Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1987 medalist, The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman.

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