Teenage Wasteland: Defeating the Machine in Daniel Pinkwater’s Chicago

“The question was plainly stated. Is there any chance that you possess a salvageable brain, or have your parents just parked you here because they know or sense that you can’t get kicked out of Wheaton? In other words, is there a glimmer of light upstairs, or are you just a fuck-up?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Acceptable answer. You may continue to sit with us.”

—Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin

In 1998 Daniel Pinkwater, an extraordinary and prolific illustrator and writer of children’s fiction, published a novel for young adults after a hiatus of thirteen years. The Education of Robert Nifkin follows the trends set by Pinkwater’s most popular young adult fiction from the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Like these, it is a story of a portly teenage outcast who extracts himself from an inept public school system and forms a cadre of culturally irreverent friends. But Nifkin also breaks new ground. Unlike most of Pinkwater’s other novels for middle readers and young adults, Nifkin is not set in the surreal geography of Hoboken, New Jersey or the apocryphal town of Baconburg. This novel is firmly situated in Chicago of the 1950s. And in contrast to Pinkwater’s usual coupling of magical realism and science fiction with the bildungsroman, Nifkin does not introduce werewolves or aliens, interplanetary realms, or talking lizards. Instead, The Education of Robert Nifkin seems to draw on a much murkier source: Pinkwater’s own adolescence.

In Uncle Boris in the Yukon, a quasi-autobiographical text, Pinkwater sails past his teenage years in Chicago with the expertise of a master cover-up artist:

Now I heroically, and generously, skip my whole adolescence and early adulthood and introduce myself a healthy idiot in my mid-twenties. I pause a moment to savor the gratification of readers who have just realized they won’t be subjected to my early disappointments and insights and sexual coming-of-age. Moment over. Thank you. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.

(61)

The Education of Robert Nifkin effectively reinstates the horrors and tribulations of adolescence expurgated from Pinkwater’s autobiographical work. And for Pinkwater, what might have been a therapeutic exercise in exorcising the demons of adolescence is in fact a much more ambitious enterprise. His rhetorical bravado, his ventures into 1950s cliché, his parodies of adults and adolescents alike, and even the facetious titling of his book—not to mention its construction as a faux college-entrance essay—situate his work as the stuff that plays with the tradition of American autobiography. Most importantly, Nifkin’s geographical and historical groundings render the pivotal struggles of Pinkwater’s adolescent characters more concretely than ever before, since the novel delineates social and economic ideologies encountered by the adolescent in a historically resonant way.

Yet for all its historical realism, Pinkwater’s novel is about escaping history, breaking away from the constraints and pressures of 1950s culture. Thrust into a veritable teenage wasteland of quasi-military despotism and anti-Communist harassment at Riverview Public High School, the protagonist Robert Nifkin becomes an escape artist, freed from the demands of adolescent paradigms. The Education of Robert Nifkin is, therefore, the story of a self recording its process of self-making, and it takes a form well suited to this task: the college entrance essay. And while it is clear from the outset that The Education of Robert Nifkin has something to say about education, Pinkwater never treats education as merely a cognitive process, or an accumulation of academic knowledge. Instead, the protagonist’s experiences move beyond the confines of the classroom and into the Chicago streets.

The philosopher Kenneth Burke inquired, “Could the most complex and sophisticated works of art legitimately be considered somewhat as ‘proverbs writ large’?” (Philosophy 256). Burke seriously contemplated the possibility that important works of literature could offer to their readers strategies for survival in the most realistic sense, and that such works could...