The Agony & the Eggplant: Daniel Pinkwater's Heroic Struggles in the Name of YA Literature (review)
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/uni.2002.0039
ISSN1080-6563
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoThis is a frustrating book. Daniel Pinkwater is one of the wittiest contemporary children's and young adult authors, who is terribly undervalued by scholars of children's literature. Unfortunately this book-length study does little to improve the situation, although it is perhaps an important first step. Clearly Walter Hogan is someone who has a great appreciation for Daniel Pinkwater and his fiction. One suspects when he writes, "Let us imagine for a moment that we have spent years collecting first editions of every one of Daniel Pinkwater's books of fiction published through the year 2000" (127), he is speaking autobiographically. While gathering a complete set of Daniel Pinkwater novels and picture books is an impressive bibliographical feat, it is only the first step toward writing a critical study of his fiction. The prolific Pinkwater seems to have overwhelmed Hogan. Pinkwater has written—and in many cases, illustrated—forty-seven picture books, twelve middle-school novels, six adolescent novels, and two collections of essays since 1970. But as Hogan notes, some of Pinkwater's critics, such as Peter Andrews, have observed that Pinkwater is at times an undisciplined and self-indulgent author who frequently overreaches and falls flat. Pinkwater is, if anything, an ambitious young adult writer. His Young Adult Novel (1982) is an ironic sendup of teen problem novels, with its "Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan" stories created by the members of the Wild Dada Ducks. One can't help but think of the passage from Robert Browning's "Andrea del [End Page 404] Sarto": "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for ?" (545). Pinkwater might add, "or young adult novel, for that matter." While Hogan makes a valiant attempt to address most of Pinkwater's books in his one hundred forty-two page study, given its length, the result is more appreciation than criticism. But as the subtitle of this critical study suggests, perhaps it would have been better if Hogan limited himself to an examination of the middle-school and adolescent novels. Sometimes less is more.
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