The Sidekick Comes of Age: How Young Adult Literature is Shifting the Sidekick Paradigm by Stephen M. Zimmerly (review)

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt …

(Eliot 7)

While the concept of the sidekick brings Prufrock's rueful words irresistibly to mind for me, Stephen M. Zimmerly gives the character far more credit than either I or T. S. Eliot would. For Zimmerly, the sidekick—perhaps Horatio, but certainly not an unnamed lord—is a named character in a text, a character with substance and, most importantly, some significant relationship to the protagonist. That relationship is what occupies the majority of this somewhat slight but interesting book. Zimmerly's argument is that YA texts (a field he defines broadly—more about that in a moment) are expanding the role of the sidekick to the point of refiguring the hero/sidekick relationship altogether, calling into question the role itself.

Zimmerly defines YA literature broadly: "if a text struggles with [the] central question of how adult identity should be shaped, it will be considered part of YA" (11). I'm not confident that even this broad definition encompasses such texts as The Hobbit (taken up in chapter one) or, for that matter, the Batman series, but the focus on the sidekick also requires attention primarily to quest, mystery, and adventure texts (see page 16). The intersection, then, of the two elements of Zimmerly's study yields up a few anomalies, such as treating The Hobbit, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Incredibles, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (to name just a few) as Young Adult texts.

Carping about definitions aside, I find that the book does a nice job of taking the issue of character in the novel seriously. An introductory chapter takes readers on a brief tour of the study of character in the novel—and it is brief, as he notes, citing Seymour Chatman: "It is remarkable how little has been said about the theory of character in literary history and criticism" (1). Given the tendency of child and adolescent readers—and, indeed, their teachers—to focus on "identification" as a primary reading strategy, one might think that character would come in for rather more attention. However, aside from Maria Nikolajeva's The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature and more recent work in cognitive studies, literary critics have, I think, rather preferred to ignore or reject the naivete of such readings and therefore missed the opportunity to theorize character more carefully.

I appreciate Zimmerly's efforts, therefore, to recognize "the particular power the secondary character can have for adolescent readers in experiencing growth and finding one's place in the world" (3). Without insisting—indeed, resisting—a naively identificatory reading strategy, one may still examine the function of particular character types in fiction and explore their meaning.

After that brief introduction, the book unfolds in five chapters and a short conclusion. Zimmerly's approach is, broadly speaking, structuralist, so he is most concerned with establishing a typology and only secondarily with in-depth analysis of texts. The first two chapters discuss fairly well-established typologies, quickly reviewing a variety of "classic sidekick roles" in chapter one ("narrative gateway," devil's advocate, comic relief, and foil) and exploring several ways sidekicks can operate as family surrogates in chapter two. Some of these readings are, it must be said, somewhat idiosyncratic. For example, in order to define his term "narrative gateway," Zimmerly offers up Scout, from To Kill A Mockingbird, as sidekick rather than protagonist, noting that she provides insight into the more enigmatic Jem, as Watson does to Holmes in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. (All of chapter one provides pairings of novels for adults with novels for adolescents to establish the sidekick types.) While an argument that interprets Scout as sidekick might be interesting, Zimmerly does not make...