Barbara Feinberg
Welcome to Lizard Motel:
Children, Stories, and the
Mystery of Making Things Up.
Beacon Press, 209 pages, $23.00

In the seventh grade, at my small public middle school, I
grumbled persistently about the books my English teacher
assigned. She sensed in my recalcitrance a chance for
experimentation and devised a new curriculum for me: I would read
the entire oeuvre of a fellow called Robert Cormier—best known
for his once-controversial The Chocolate War—and interview him
by telephone.

The project was not a pleasant one. Jerry Renault, the
protagonist of The Chocolate War, is essentially a Holden
Caulfield clone; the book is gloomy and pedantic: all life is
suffering, non illegitimi carborundum, and the like. Cormier’s
other “young adult novels” hinge on home invasion, a school
bus hijacking, a boy living in an experimental
medical clinic, and other hypothetical “growing pains.” The
interview that capped off my grueling reading confirmed
my suspicion that this author wishes to teach children that life
isn’t fair and get used to it.

Barbara Feinberg’s Welcome to Lizard Motel, which looks at the
popularity among educators of just this sort of “problem
novel,” never mentions Cormier—but the books it
does mention are, against all odds, even uglier than his. Next to
the classics of children’s literature (I would hold up the work
of C. S. Lewis, E. B. White, or even Roald Dahl), these books are “narrower in
focus, less rich in narrative scope, and at times [feel] ‘as if
the writers had begun
with the problem rather than the plot or
characters.’”

What might that problem be? Take your pick. While doing research,
Feinberg encounters a librarian who offers this apt précis
of the “problem novel”: “Oh—my mother’s boyfriend raped
me, and my mother is in jail, and I have a brain tumor? Those
books?” Indeed—and the fact that those books are so contrived, so
unsubtle, must account for much of the emphasis today’s curricula
place upon them. Children, says Feinberg, desire “recourse to
fantasy”; a teacher may see fantasy as an
impediment to
instruction.

It has become a part of the teacher’s perceived duty to
expose children to the nasty side of life—as though life itself
were not perfectly capable of doing so. Yet, strangely, the means
children use to cope with that nastiness—imagination, humor, and
storytelling—are given shorter and shorter
shrift. For example,
Feinberg’s seven-year-old daughter is placed in a writing program
at school, in which she is to write, of all things, a
memoir. (Just the facts, ma’am.)

In the quirky
conditional voice with which Clair has written about our lives as
if all the things in our lives are over, have already passed,
used to be, “would” occur, and are present now only in memory,
the implication is that these things occur no more… .

This whole enterprise is something adults have imposed. And
why? Why is my generation hell-bent on making our children wake
from the dream of their childhoods? So they can fast-forward to a
time when their childhoods are over, safely encoded in memory? So
they are like adults, dreamy with nostalgia?

“Dreamy with nostalgia” is not quite the phrase this exercise suggests.
Quite to the contrary, the impulse to teach seven year olds the art of memoir
seems of a piece with the therapy obsession of Barbara Feinberg’s
generation. That this obsession is trickling down to the young is
everywhere in evidence. Witness the phenomenon of “reality
television”: participants are startlingly adept at discussing and
interpreting their behavior and feelings, but at a total loss
when it comes to applying this self-knowledge in a useful way.

It hardly needs stating that this preoccupation is not something that ought to
be encouraged in young children. It tends more than anything else
to foster a myopic self-absorption. Feinberg notes that
(according to the children’s literature specialist Sheila Egoff),
“problem novels” are “often told in the first person, and [are]
often confessional and self-centered.” (This mode will be familiar
to anyone who has rolled his eyes through a creative writing
“workshop.”)

Again, the thinking seems to be that the earlier children
learn that life will kick them when they’re down—and that
constant, focused reflection of life’s worst elements is the best
medicine—the better off they’ll be. Whether or not this outlook
is even remotely therapeutic for adults, Feinberg makes it clear
that it isn’t for children—whether in their writing or reading.
But what should be encouraged instead?

Feinberg is herself a teacher. She runs a children’s arts
program called Story Shop, and her methods sound far better
suited to a child’s taste than any memoir-writing program:
“Children write stories, and tell them, and enact them, and build
scenes and characters out of paper and boxes and odds and ends.” In
other words, her young charges have complete freedom to pursue
the fantastic and absurd, without the stifling intrusion of adult
concerns.

They don’t have to write about themselves, either.
Feinberg insists that “Interest in a child’s experience, as a
means toward vitalizing writing, is constraining, not expanding,
if I insist that the only meaningful story a child can relay
is one that is actual.”

It should surprise no one that children prefer fantasy to
reflection; at seven years old, one doesn’t have much to reflect
upon. But there is an even clearer reason for it: when teachers
insist upon sobriety, realism, and—whether or not they intend
it—disillusionment, they miss the point that a vigorous
imagination in fact fortifies one against unhappiness.

A case in
point: Feinberg learns from a friend who works in an orphanage
that suffering children, even ones as old as twelve or thirteen,
prefer Mother Goose to “problem novels” like Bridge to
Terebithia (in which the main character’s best friend drowns) or
They Cage the Animals at Night (about a boy abandoned to foster
care by his mother). For these children, the smallest comfort or
creative indulgence is preferable to dwelling on their own
tragedies.

Of course, at its best, the adult desire to examine the
self is indispensable. But in contemporary literature, popular
culture, and education, the activity reeks of navel-gazing and
self-satisfaction, not the pursuit of virtue or maturity.
Children naturally have the right idea: they grow by looking
outward with a curious and often selfless eye.

The final surprise of Lizard Motel is that Barbara Feinberg
does not make her recommendations from a comfortable perch. The
book, as noted on its jacket, is largely a memoir itself. The
last third deals with
Feinberg’s young daughter’s
surgeries for a benign (though recurring) inner ear tumor.
It’s the stuff of

“problem novels,” to be sure, but Feinberg dodges the temptation to be
dark—or to exploit her family’s difficulty. Instead she offers
her story as proof that humor and imagination are the thing:

Just as we come to the door of the operating room, Clair gets out
of the car. As we are about to enter, she suddenly falls to her
knees, grabbing the anesthesiologist, who is a sober German named
Dr. Schmidt, and says, “You gotta help me, Doc! I’m doomed. I’ve
got a wife and three kids at home!” Dr. Schmidt and the rest of
us are bewildered, and frozen, for the moment. But then everyone
bursts out laughing… . [Clair] shrugs and says, “I saw that
on a Bugs Bunny cartoon once.”

A joke? Right outside the operating room? Our inward-looking
society, with all its indignant victims, ought to give this bedside
manner a try.