Middle-Grade or YA: WHERE’S THE “WAR” IN WEDNESDAY?
by S.T. Lile
“All of my friends were Irish Catholic or Jewish, and there were some years I was the only Protestant kid in the entire class,” says Gary Schmidt in an article posted on the Calvin College website. He’s an English professor there with a particular interest in investigating the ways that “our individual life stories reveal underlying patterns” – patterns that are both universal and transpersonal, that bind us together as human beings who are trying to make sense out of the ups and downs of life.
That statement is, in essence, the theme of The Wednesday Wars, Schmidt’s 2008 Newbery Honor book. There was talk of this book following in the bi-award footsteps of Schmidt’s earlier work, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy that won honors in both the Newbery and Prinz categories for middle grade and young adult respectively, but that didn’t happen. Why?
The answer to that question lies in how the author deals with the story’s underlying world events and personal issues of the characters. The HOW is what separates middle grade from young adult, in theory as distinct a difference as that which separates middle school life from high school angst. The pressures are different, the perspectives are different, the range of experience is different. If The Wednesday Wars were compared to Prinz medalist Looking for Alaska, the only commonalities one would find is a semi-geeky male main character interacting with a bunch of other kids in school. Everything else is a league apart, and it’s not just because the Alaska characters are older.
Here’s why.
Consider the concept of concentric circles, the old rock-thrown-in-water analogy. For the characters in The Wednesday Wars, their world is the center of the circle. The bigger life-impacting issues such as the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and Walter Cronkite’s news reports belong to other people and live in the outer circles. If this had been a Prinz book, these outer life issues would be intimately co-mingled with the lives of the central characters. For example, Holling would have had to register for the draft, not Holling’s sister’s boyfriend. In The Wednesday Wars, each of these outer-life issues is personified by a different character.
Mrs. Baker, the teacher Holling is certain hates him, is portrayed as hard and angry, although we learn later that she’s kind and giving but made hard by the heavy sadness of having her husband sent off to Vietnam.
Holling’s sister Heather, is the high school Flower Child who despairs at the worlds’ injustices and fights against the constraints placed on her by her parents. In her character we see a politically aware and hopeful person who gets shredded by the mean-hearted assassination of presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy. Her personal loss of hope as a result of that event mirrors the shattering of the collective hope held by millions of Americans at that time.
The interactions between Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi represent the blind discrimination and hatred that comes from knowing only the idea of a person, not the person herself. Theirs is the type of racism and discrimination that comes from the pain of war—Mrs. Bigio loses her husband in Vietnam and takes out her grief on Mai Thi only to later realize that Mai Thi as an individual had nothing to do with his death. Having lost her family and been transplanted to America, the young Vietnamese girl’s life was as ravaged by war as Mrs. Bigio’s.
Holling’s parents comprise a weird cliché of “typical middle Americans” who follow the news but who never really let it sink in. They are as plastic as the coverings on their prefect couch cushions—impervious to the sorrows of the world around them and immersed in a weird self-absorption that keeps them oblivious to the trials and sorrows of their children. They are the biggest disappointment in the book.
Shakespeare, however, is the voice from the past. He comes through for Holling in the unexpected role of a sort of spirit guide, introduced in the story to help Holling through this difficult transition between seventh and eighth grade. We hear Shakespeare speak through Holling, “Toads, beetles, bats.” We see plot parallels between Romeo and Juliet and Holling and Meryl Lee (fathers with rival architecture firms). We discover, as does Holling, the concept of universal emotion as it applies to lives across time.
And as for the rats, they, too, have their own sub plot, and it’s an important one. They represent the nervous anticipation of the time—the perception that vengeful, unseen things are lurking in the walls of the world. Things that can’t be captured or caged no matter how hard you try. Instead you must wait, and watch the ceiling tiles bulge, listen to the scratching and scrabbling in the walls, and know that the rats are collecting things to use against you in any small-minded way they can. They are bigger villains than Doug Swieteck’s brother. They are the Villains of Unknown Power, which was largely the perspective on governments of the time.
Each character in the story played an essential role. Each role epitomizes Schmidt’s idea that “our individual life stories reveal underlying patterns” in the bigger world picture. In that sense, the book was a success. But on a larger scale, was it more than a “year in the life” story? What would it take to bump it firmly into the young adult genre? The answer is this—Schmidt could write the sister’s story, complete with political strife, first sex, and parental defiance. Hers would be more of an emotional tale driven by self-motivated action as opposed to the story of a seventh grade boy who spends his days reacting to a whirlpool of events that swirl around him.
The joy of a great middle grade book, however, is that it can maintain that suspended moment between unjaded youth and scared-shitless teenager. The Wednesday Wars does that with humor, a finely woven series of sub plots, language, and the unexpected realization of small dreams.
While some would say those realizations of small dreams make the book sappy and predictable, their purpose was to shift the reader’s (and the characters’) expectations. We often expect things to go a certain way and feel that things have failed if they don’t. The shifts in this book help us remember that what you think is true about a person or way of doing something isn’t always so. Holling learned that about Mrs. Baker numerous times. Although Schmidt almost overdid it (Mrs. Baker couldn’t just be a runner, she was an Olympic runner), her role was like that of the Oz—a big tough persona on the outside, an accomplished, kindhearted human on the inside. It just took a few lifts of the curtain to see that.
The “war” in The Wednesday Wars runs throughout the plot, setting, and cast of characters. Everyone is fighting his or her own little battle whether at home or abroad. Sometimes that “war” is merely a matter of perception that changes with time. Sometimes, the affects of war lie in its reverberations and the bonds it creates. Such was the case with Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Bigio opening the telegram from the no-longer Missing in Action Lt. Baker.
From that scene and the one of Holling meeting his sister at the bus station, came one of my favorite lines in the book, “Sometimes you have to let yourself be found.” It was Holling’s wisest line and it applied to his sister, to Lt. Baker, and possibly in some small way to himself as “being found” by Shakespeare.
What that line means in a deeper context, if we follow Schmidt’s idea that patterns in humanness exist that are both “universal and transpersonal, that bind us together as human beings,” is exactly what it says. Sometimes we have to stop fighting and hiding and open ourselves up to being found. It’s hard to do, but that’s what growing up is all about.
War is the pattern that bound these characters together as human beings. How these characters interact is what makes this a middle-grade novel.
