Rereading Robert Cormier: Realism, Naturalism, and the Young Adult Novel

The strange thing is that I am more concerned with reality than realism in the novels I write, despite the evidence of The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, and After the First Death. Realism is a label other people have applied to the novels. Labels are also applied after the fact. What counts is the writing itself, what happens before the fact.

(Cormier, “Forever Pedaling” 47)

There’s that dichotomy again. In my own life I don’t see it, and yet I know it’s out there. The strange thing is that I am an optimist and I see that old cliché—I see the bottle half full rather than half empty. Do I really write pessimistically? I don’t think I write pessimistically. I probably write—well, I suppose it is pessimistically.

(Cormier qtd. in Sutton 29)

Thus speaks Robert Cormier (1925–2000), the highly celebrated, yet deeply controversial American author of some of the most bleak and uncompromising masterworks in young adult literature. In Peter Hunt’s assessment, Cormier is “probably in the top ten writers who are essential reading for an understanding of the development of children’s literature in the twentieth century and for understanding the category of ‘young adult’ or ‘adolescent’ novel” (51). The emergence of this category in the United States is inextricably linked to the American predilection for realism and especially the so-called New Realism of the late 1960s and 1970s, which reacted against romantic and sentimental models and opted for an unprecedented frankness in language, themes, and issues in children’s fiction (Russell 240). Seminal practitioners include S. E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Robert Lipsyte, Judy Blume, and of course Cormier. Yet as much as critics, teachers, librarians, and young readers have praised Cormier for his frankness, reaffirming the realist claims of his work in terms of its thematic content, unflinching treatment and perceived pedagogical value, his detractors insist that his work is far from realistic. Thus noted librarian and reviewer Betsy Hearn, clearly disconcerted by Cormier’s debut young adult novel, The Chocolate War (1974), finds in its negative view of human nature and depiction of corruption and power abuses in a Catholic boys’ school characters and situations quite unbelievable: “The book may make some interesting classroom discussion, but as a piece of realistic writing, I don’t buy it” (1199). Nor does Norma Bagnall, who argues that the book is not suitable for young readers, in so far as it “presents a distorted view of reality and a feeling of absolute hopelessness that is unhealthy” (217). More equivocal in his praise of the writer, Perry Nodelman is still highly sceptical of Cormier’s self-styled realism/reality. For him, books like The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese (1977) cater to an already skewed, paranoid, self-indulgent adolescent vision:

In fact, The Chocolate War reads like other unremittingly naturalistic, unremittingly negative novels, designed to please adolescent readers by pretending that the corrupt world they describe is actually the real one. Despite their naturalistic settings, such novels are fantasies, pleasingly paranoid in their insistence that the world is not only corrupt, but out to get nice, innocent, young people just like you.

(“Robert Cormier Does a Number” 101)

Interestingly, Nodelman’s description here of Cormier’s “fantasies” as “naturalistic” as opposed to “realistic” contains more truth than the leading scholar perhaps realizes. For a case can be made that Cormier’s work is best appreciated and understood through the lens of naturalism as a literary mode, which represents both a continuation of and departure from realism.

Indeed, linking Cormier to naturalism offers new insights into key texts in the young adult canon, allowing for richer, more nuanced analyses and accounting for the often conflicting interpretations of his work from different sources. This essay compares three sets of documents—Cormier’s self-assessments, others’ reception, and his fiction—to argue that naturalism is the most fruitful way of understanding his work. First, Cormier’s own comments, statements, and claims about reality and realism reveal how the author conceptualizes his intention. When he passed...