Are You There, God? It's Me, Me, ME!: Judy Blume's Self-Absorbed Narrators

Like Cuisinart and fast food franchises, Judy Blume goes marching on. Onwards through sibling rivalry, divorce, menstruation, teenage sex, and ethnic upward mobility. One hesitates to speculate on what the theme of the next book for the pre-adolescent market will be for a writer whose muse seems to be Haim Ginott rather than Calliope. One can be assured, however, that it will mirror what people have been talking about lately in Darien and Short Hills and San Fernando, that it will be rendered with a cheerful, reassuring suburban sameness, and that it will have the same relationship to a truly significant exploration of social problems that a Stanley Kramer film does.

It's no secret that kids like Blume books—boxed paperback sets were a big seller last Christmas—but it's doubtful that the novelty of her themes alone is responsible for her popularity. After all, this kind of "realism" has become the cliched substance of Norman Lear situation comedies, and Judy Blume's books are really old-fashioned by comparison with, say, Norma Klein. In spite of the many, tiresome allusions to Bloomingdale's, these are not really trendy books and the values they promote are very much those of mainstream, Middle America.

Nor does it seem that Blume's books, or any other "problem" novels, ought to be discussed and evaluated on the basis of what they teach children about handling specific social or personal problems. Though books of this type may sometimes be useful in giving children a vehicle for recognizing and ventilating their feelings, they are, after all, works of fiction and not self-help manuals. Their success depends on the author's handling of narrative techniques and their meaning and educative value is embedded in those same techniques. To discover the key to Blume's popularity, one has to look beyond the realistic trappings and didactic intentions of the "problem" book to a closer study of why her narrative techniques work especially well with children. To understand what her books really teach children, one has to understand the way in which these techniques are used to communicate a style of experiencing and perceiving the self and the world and a definition of what it means to be a pre-adolescent child in suburban America.

As is often the case with popular fiction, Blume's books are successful for what they are not as much as for what they are. That is, her books are not very demanding and they make for the kind of easy, rapid reading that children like to relax with. Since all her books are told through the voice of a child narrator, the vocabulary is necessarily limited and the sentence construction basic and repetitious.

Her plots are loose and episodic: they accumulate rather than develop. They are not complicated or demanding and the pace is sometimes sloppy, as in Blubber, where Jill's change of heart seems too sudden and contrived. She has a repertoire of stock minor characters—the annoying older or younger sibling, the steadfast friend—who can be counted on as plot machinery or for comic effects. In the tradition of children's books, parents are kept harmlessly out of the way. And in the vein of recent American children's books, these parents are usually well-meaning but ineffectual characters whose efforts at communication are often comic failures.

On the other hand, Judy Blume is a careful observer of the everyday details of children's lives and she has a feel for the little power struggles and shifting alliances of their social relationships. She knows that children can be cruel to one another and that they are deeply concerned with peer group judgments. She can be funny in a broad, slapstick way, as in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, but her humor is more often based on regarding her characters with cloying adult irony. For example, there is the scene in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. where Janie and Margaret, with much self-consciousness and embarrassment, purchase a package...