'Holes' (L. Sachar) and the need for complexity in fiction

 

Holes and the need for complexity

Louis Sachar ‘Holes’ is a Young Adult novel that was an enormous success around the world (more than 6 million copies sold). Published in 1998, it has won multiple awards in various countries, it was translated in many different languages and was even adapted for the cinema.

Is it a good book, pleasant to read, well-put together, efficiently narrated? Yes, without a doubt.

The pace is good, it never slackens or loses coherence, and there’s a hint of complexity in the narrative structure as well, with unannounced flash-backs that are at first difficult to link to the main story. It reads very easily of course since it’s for younger readers, but at the same time there’s no real feeling of the author talking the reader down: it feels like he’s taking the reader seriously, and not treating them like a child.

Yet, what I would like to focus on here is how much of a missed opportunity this novel also is. I liked it well enough, but I do think that it is symbolic of much of what Young Adult literature too often offers – or fails to offer: while it’s great to make reading pleasant, it would be even better to infuse it with some complexity to make the reader think. In the case of Holes, I think the author refused to commit one way or the other and he ended up going for the bland and inoffensive rather than developing ideas and asking his readers to think deeply. Or perhaps he was so intent on rounding off a neat narrative trick that it came at the cost of substance.

And the real question here is: can inexperienced – or reluctant, or young – readers pick up on the topics that Holes contains by themselves? They may love the novel, but did it help them think about the world? How do teachers deal with that paradox: an entertaining novel containing the possibility of many great topics to discuss…that it never discusses?

Holes’ plot is excellent: a teenager is sent to a correctional facility somewhere in Texas to work out a crime he’s accused of having committed, although he denies he ever did it. That facility is a private camp, set in a dried-out lake, and the inmates – teenagers all – are forced to dig holes all day. Each hole must be a certain size, and everyone must work hard lest they be deprived of food, water and basic necessities. There’s also physical violence exerted on the kids, deprivations, verbal and physical abuse and inhumane treatments.

That starting point alone brings up many interesting issues, among which:

              What to do with young delinquents? Privatised prisons; forced labour; forced labour for minors; double penalty of being deprived of your freedom AND being made to work; detention facilities as insalubrious places. You could add the fact that the narrator, Stanley, being poor and status-less, is unjustly treated yet accepts the judgment meekly: a reflection of the inequities of the justice system perhaps?

As an experienced reader, you’re immediately thinking: Right, this is going to be interesting. But the author had other ideas, unfortunately, as none of those topics and themes are going to be dealt with in any serious way.

Partly, that’s to do with the necessity of having an engaging, pacey plot: such a YA text cannot afford to be too slow, or too reflective, or too disquisitive. But partly it’s to do with the trick I mentioned above: a narrative trick that is very neat indeed but which forces the writer to attend to it at all times. And that, I would argue, is a big reason for the novel to remain superficial. The trick is this: the story spans about a hundred years and connects the present characters with their ancestors. And it turns out all those ancestors were connected as well.  So in the end, the narrator’s name – Stanley Yelnats – echoes the loop across time: a palindromic story, if you will. It does lead to some extreme turning and twisting here (a Black grand-mother from Eastern Europe?), but the main problem for me is that this narrative trick carries no meaning in itself. It could have been an opportunity to bring in questions related to immigration (or emigration, of course), integration, the origins of the USA…but no: it’s just background to make the trick work. Granted, you could extrapolate some quasi-religious idea here, or make a point about cosmic events, destiny, even bring in the Buddhist cycles of the world – but kids on their own? Would they?

Let me be clear: the trick is neat, but as itself it is nothing more than a trick, and being demanding (all strands must converge, all names must converge) it ends up taking way too much space. It reminded me of the last three volumes of Harry Potter, where so many narrative strands had been raised earlier than the author needed hundreds of pages just to solve all the problems she had created earlier. Those weren’t novels anymore, they were answer sheets for the fans.

That’s one problem here: complexity (or near-complexity) of plot doesn’t make for a complex text, nor does it ensure complex ideas will be brought to the fore.

For example, it is clear that there is an over-representation of poor, disadvantaged kids in this camp, as well as ethnic minorities. And we know that reflects what is the case in America. So that was a great opportunity to just touch on that subject, through a comment from a character, a paragraph perhaps. But no: absolutely nothing is done with that. So when the lawyer who finally gets the narrator out turns out to be an Mexican-American, nothing is done with that either. Adults may well make a connection (ethnic minorities defend other ethnic minorities, the lawyer is very humane etc.), but will kids do so?

Similarly, the camp is situated on a dried-out lake that, a hundred years earlier, was still a lake: why not make a clear reference to, I don’t know, climate change? A character wondering how on earth it’s possible for a whole lake to evaporate? Not much you know, just to help readers make connections? But no.

The villain of the story – a woman – is very much a villain indeed, almost comically so, with poisoned nails and cruel to the core. Fine, even if again the complexity of evil is surely more interesting than evil itself, and being so stereotypical erases all nuance. But the main problem is that this character’s back-story also had to fit the narrative patterns of echoes across time: that back-story is introduced, described, explained and solved in one paragraph, and never referred to again. The villain had been made to dig by her parents, just like she makes others dig today. But the lack of complexity hits again: far from wondering about kids echoing their parents, or greed consuming all, or the psychological damage inflicted on that young girl having consequences decades later, the text races towards its conclusion. Again it had raised interesting possibilities in terms of ideas, again it ran away from them.

In fact, to circle back to the beginning of this blog, the whole psychology of the situation is left out completely: the impact on the young teens, the cruelty shown by adults, the dehumanization of young people – in the end, everyone’s happy and everything’s dandy.

While I understand the limitations of such a genre, and therefore the self-imposed limitations for the novelist, I really feel as if this was like someone giving you a shovel to dig holes in hard ground, only to find out the shovel is made of flexible rubber. It’s hard not to wonder whether it was worth it since there’s little you can do with it: superficially it looks the part, but underneath there’s little to be had.

The fiction we use in class needs to have complexity: shades, nuances, asperities. That fiction needs to be engaging, somehow, but without complexity it will be just that: nice to read. And then what? By refusing to make hard choices, and by being welded to a chosen narrative structure, Louis Sachar ended up giving us a morally bland, swerving-around-the-issues novel where potentially excellent ideas are so thinly introduced that they will be missed by many of those we want to help think through reading. Yes, we teachers can make something out of it, but I do wish the text had seized on a great opportunity to introduce what readers and teachers alike need with fiction: complexity, nuance and grey areas.

As Graham Greene once wrote: 'The world is not black and white; the world is black and grey'.