Zindel, Paul 1936–: Critical Essay by David Rees

There is something peculiarly subversive about Zindel's books that appeals to the adolescent. Adults, particularly authoritarian figures like policemen or teachers, are usually portrayed in a bad light, and the reader can feel himself happily encapsulated in an immature world in which the young are wronged, misunderstood, and generally knocked about; where the battle-lines between the generations are very clearly drawn; and the teenager who thinks he's got problems can be at ease, identify with the central characters, or find he's not the only misfit, unsuccessful at home or at school, with his friends, with the opposite sex. Whether life is really like this is another matter. For the adult, reading the collected works of Paul Zindel is a slightly tedious process, which is not the experience one has with some writers of teenage fiction. The world, in fact, is not as distorted as it appears to be in these books: it isn't so narrow, so neurotic as this. The point of view is as out of focus as if someone had quite literally stepped on the narrator's eyeball. There is also the problem of narrowness of range in the material; though there are differences in theme and emphasis, Zindel seems essentially to be covering the same ground again and again, and never appears to do it quite so well as he did it in his first novel, The Pigman. And there is the famous "style."

Zindel's style is often praised for being the authentic voice of the modern teenager…. Zindel's voice, in fact, is specifically that of the New Yorker, and a special kind of New Yorker, too: intellectually very bright and probably of East European origin. It is doubtful whether anybody in real life actually talks like a Zindel character; the hyperboles, the verbal fireworks, the enormous width of vocabulary and cross-reference, though often exceedingly clever and funny, are just too much to accept as everyday speech. His voice is a very useful vehicle for looking at life in the peculiarly lop-sided poses Zindel's characters adopt, but it probably has its origins as much in literature as in reality. As I've said before, it's not so far removed from the voice of Holden Caulfield [the protagonist of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951]…. In 1951 the American young were dancing fox-trots and worrying about being drafted for Korea. Holden Caulfield would have known nothing of the drug scene, the beat generation, flower power, sexual permissiveness, Vietnam, pollution, the energy crisis, and a thousand other things that have interested the young since Holden was sixteen. It seems strange, then, to a British adult reader of the same age as Holden would be that today's kids still talk as he does in so many American books.

Read the rest of this Criticism with our Zindel, Paul 1936–: Critical Essay by David Rees Access Pass.