The Agony & the Eggplant: Daniel Pinkwater's Heroic Struggles in the Name of YA Literature (review)

Walter Hogan. The Agony & the Eggplant: Daniel Pinkwater's Heroic Struggles in the Name of YA Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 2001.

This 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 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.

The other problem is that Hogan is too much in awe of Pinkwater. One of the functions of the critic is to separate the wheat from the chaff, but for Hogan everything that Pinkwater has written is good stuff. He doesn't focus on individual texts at any great length. This is unfortunate, for when he does, he provides thoughtful analysis, as is the case in his comparison of Lizard Music (1976) and its relationship to Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-EuclidianAdventures in Mountain Climbing (1952). He recognizes that The Education of Robert Niflin (1998) is a revision of Pinkwater's first adolescent novel, Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars (1979), stripped of its science fiction and fantasy elements. Hogan also shows that The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1984) is a comic mystery rather than strange science fiction, which has significant implications for the Galt/Sigerson theme of the novel. There is more hero worship than scholarship in this study; however, Hogan is quite successful in his presentation of Pinkwater as a talented and quirky adolescent writer, for upon completing The Agony and the Eggplant, most readers will want to pick up a Pinkwater novel. The writer triumphs over the critic, although it isn't much of a struggle.

D. H. Lawrence warns in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) to, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it" (2). Hogan realizes that Pinkwater—with his frequent use of tricksters, hucksters and impostors such as Samuel Klugarsh in Alan Mendolsohn or Charlie, the Chicken Man, in LizardMusic—fits comfortably in the American literary grain from Huckleberry Finn on. While Hogan recognizes the...