Books: Pinkwater on high school horrors

Oh, elementary school: crude hazing, two-minute homework assignments, fascist teachers. For those of us who are tempted to romanticize our youth, or at least forget about it, Daniel Pinkwater's books fondly bring back all the bad memories with good humor. Along with The Pushcart War, The Phantom Tollbooth, and a handful of others, his "juvenile" books have been with me for the 12 years since I first read them. Not only for their intelligence, comedy, and high spirits, but what's now apparent as absolutely nihilistic cynicism. Like all the best children's authors, Pinkwater is a contemptuous misanthrope, and a very funny one.

The two masterpieces in this anthology, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, and Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars, both involve fat New York Jewish kids and assorted bizarreness. In the first, Winston Bongo and Walter Galt meet eccentrics like the Mighty Gorilla and Captain Shep Nesterman and his dancing chicken Dharmawati, who all help foil a kidnapping that turns out to be part of a plan to aid an alien invasion of Earth through the destruction of a giant electric avocado (never fully explained, but it has something to do with licensed realtors). In the second, Leonard Neeble and Alan Mendelsohn learn the ancient secrets of Venusian mind control to ease their dull high school life, then free the lost city of Waka-Waka from the tyranny of the three Nafsulian pirates Manny, Moe, and Jack.

The plots are fairly random and nonsensical (they bear some resemblance to John Sladek and Harry Mathews' OuLiPo-inspired exercises), but unfailingly hysterical, and doused with references that the eight-year-old me must have missed. The real reason to read them, though, is Pinkwater's acidic take on the horrible, numbing experience of high school. (If you had a good high school experience, these books aren't for you; stop reading now.) Most of the kids are cruel and stupid, and the teachers, when not cruel or stupid, are just insane. Leonard's biology teacher talks to her plants and animals: "She especially likes to talk to her alligator. Everyone in the class lives in hope that the alligator will bite Miss Sweet, not because Miss Sweet is hateful in herself--after all, it's obvious that she's crazy and not responsible--but just because such an event would break the horrible monotony."

Pinkwater's solution to this misery is simple: insane fantasy and desperate camaraderie with the handful of people as bored as you. Aside from the protagonists, all the characters, good or evil, behave in irrational and occasionally stupid ways, and none of them is ultimately any more helpful to the kids than senile old Miss Sweet--they're just more interesting. Pinkwater separates the world into worthless drones and entertaining freaks, but they're all useless.

As for the other books, Slaves of Spiegel is a short slice of life about the Fat Men of planet Spiegel's search for the ultimate junk food, and The Last Guru is an amusing story of the Silly Hat sect of Tibet. Then there's Young Adult Novel. It's the story of a group of high schoolers called the Wild Dada Ducks, and their conceptual pranks on the fairly dumb masses and faculty of Himmler High School. Besides providing a primer on Duchamp for impressionable youngsters, it describes their all-too-successful attempt to make one kid the undisputed king of the school, and ends with a violent massacre involving Grapenuts. It's surreal in a way that none of the other books are; with the exception of a handful of dialogue from their chosen kid and the principal, no one utters a word aside from the Wild Dada Ducks. The others do little but act like sheep. Himmler High is mechanized, distant, and utterly inhuman. The Ducks cut themselves off and only speak amongst themselves, locked into their Dada. Engaging with the world is a novelty, and worthwhile only on occasion for purely comedic value.

Reading Pinkwater does happen to be one of those occasions.

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