Robert Cormier is a conspicuous oddity in his chosen field. Writing for the adolescent reader, he has departed from standard models and broken some of the most fundamental taboos of that vocation. Each of his hard-edged novels for the young goes considerably beyond the standard limits of "contemporary realism" to describe a world of painful harshness, where choices are few and consequences desperate. Moreover, his novels are unequivocally downbeat; [The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese and After...

Novels for young adults that deal with social issues of one sort or another have been around for quite awhile now. In fact, social relevance seems to be a primary feature of the genre, the attempt to catch the reader by surprise with unconventional characters and situations as much a part of the books' basic ingredients as the adolescent hero himself. Many of these novels, however, stop short of fully exploring the issues they introduce. It is enough, the sentiment seems to be, that the subjects are ...

Recently we have seen a trend in literature for young people that some call realism, but in fact it is not realistic at all. Realism is an honest attempt to picture people and events as they really are. To portray things from the brutal or dark side only, as is being done in current literature, is no more realistic than presenting only those sweet and idealistic stories of an earlier age. As an example, The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, is described as a realistic junior novel, and it meets some of the ...

The process of naming characters is a fascinating area of young adult literature. In some of the best books, characters' names have been chosen or devised so carefully that they qualify as poetry. Many of them are phonologically interesting, employing such poetic devices as rhyme, repetition, and rhythm. The communication is often on more than one level with different readers appreciating different connotations and different layers of symbolism. And also like poetry, they are semantically compact in ...

Until very recently, simple romances were "out" in YA realism, replaced by novels about various social concerns: drug abuse, premarital sex, and so on. Instead of a character being the focus of the novel, a condition became the subject of examination. With individual books often described as "tough," "honest," and "hard-hitting," the genre became known as the "New Realism." Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Nilsen claim that not only had there ...

Time was, not so very long ago, when books for adolescent readers centered on such things as a pair of plucky youths and their adventures on an island. Islands were neat. For one thing, there were rarely parents on them, and if the plot dictated that our protagonists were to arrive there via shipwreck, the wrecked ship in question fairly bulged with keen survival gear. When there were villains, they inevitably possessed hearts as black as coal, and they were, even when not very bright, the most interesting ...

Few literary tricks can be more annoying to a reader—to this reader, at least—than to find the author pleading for sympathy for a character when that character is clearly dreadful, hopeless, impossible to cherish. Think of the legions of virginal young damsels who bloom in the lush gardens of 19th-century English fiction. How our feelings are played upon! How we are hectored to love them!… Whatever else has happened to fiction these past fifty years, we can be grateful for the passing o...

Many books on the shelves for adolescent reading subscribe to the idea that by age sixteen or seventeen, a female's primary developmental task is to be able to attract the attentions of a worthy male. Certainly achieving a feminine social role is one of the adolescent's tasks, and many high school girls do equate that task with attracting a male and subordinate all other concerns to it. It would be too restrictive for teachers, critics, or publishers to specify any particular concept of female...

[Now and at the Hour] has the ring of personal experience, which the setting, a New England factory town, and the social level, that of skilled labor just below the promotable-to-management level, unobtrusively reinforce. It is not likely that a writer who did not know this particular kind of world at first hand could present it so casually or with such conviction. Mr. Cormier does not give much attention to his background, for his interest runs in another direction, but every detail that he provides is rig...

To chronicle the small pleasures, the larger troubles and the rare triumphs of the somewhat seedy poor in such a way as to make the characters interesting and even strangely attractive is no small achievement. Mr. Cormier is apparently fully launched on a career of detailing the annals of the poor, and his special cachet is that he manages this intractable material without sentimentality, without crying out at the culpability of society (that convenient scapegoat of the sociologically-minded novelist), and ...

[In Now and at the Hour] Alph Le Blanc, an ordinary, family man who is a factory worker, lies in bed during (what he fears and cannot at first accept) the last weeks of his life…. In the narrowing circumference of his days he comes to know pain, the glimpse of forsythia and visits from falsely cheerful friends and family. He has the force of his faith behind him as he comes quietly to realize the power of an uneventful but good life….

The short story is not my favorite form, but Robert Cormier is one of my favorite authors. Here, in this collection [Eight Plus One], a gentler, calmer, more vulnerable side of him is revealed. Sometimes, the narrator is an adolescent; more often he is an adult. He is always male, and addresses us in the first person. The stories are about relationships: about fathers, about sons, about fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters, and about husbands…. Each story is prefaced by a remarkable "in...

A master of taut, twisting plots and clear prose, [Cormier, an] inventive writer, creates sufficient mystery, deception, and irony [in The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] to rival the force of I Am the Cheese…. But because the narrative events are less ambiguous, the feelings less subtle, and the symbolism more obvious, the reader's discoveries are diminished. Although the Madonna-like Cassie and her parallel story are less convincing and some secondary characters are clichés, Barney and the ot...

While [Eight Plus One] should interest many young adult Cormier fans, it seems even more suitable for an adult audience, not because of the difficulty or sophistication of the writing but because of the subject matter; most of the stories are written from an adult's viewpoint. Many have autobiographical overtones, and while they are not as trenchant or exciting as the author's The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese, they are adroitly crafted, perceptive, and often poignant vignettes about the c...

[In "Take Me Where the Good Times Are"] an oldster named Tommy Bartin has a brief but violent furlough from the Monument City Infirmary, so called because "nobody is supposed to say 'poorhouse' anymore."… Mr. Cormier depicts his inevitably disastrous odyssey with an admirable lack of hokum, bypassing the easy sentimentality that this drab El Dorado invites…. It is a pleasure to add that the sum total of [Bartin's] failures to recapture his ident...

[In the stories in Eight Plus One] Cormier writes mostly about the pains and dilemmas of teenagers, but often with the distance and nostalgia of a father. These are his most successful stories; others, told from the point of view of the teenager, work less well, because the language sometimes seems forced and artificial. Robert Wilson, in a review of "Eight Plus One," in Book World—The Washington Post, January 11, 1981, p. 7.