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 wit...

["My Darling, My Hamburger"] seems to me to be a better novel than "The Pigman."… It's the story of two couples in their senior year at high school. One pair, Maggie and Dennis, are squareish, not too attractive, unsure of themselves and each other. The other pair, Liz and Sean, are desperately in love, and the boy is importunate. And he gets his way. (The girl's resistance is ended, convincingly, not by persuasion or passion but because her stepfather is nas...

Four months after the end of The Pigman …, John and Lorraine discover Gus, a sick, lonely old man, living inside Mr. Pignati's house and force themselves on him in friendship. They tell the story [in The Pigman's Legacy] in the same alternating first-person chapters; similarities from the plot (Gus dies at the novel's climax) to small incidents (Gus initiates a psychoanalyzing parlor game as Mr. Pignati did), to vocabulary and jokes … parrot The Pigman, but the strong char...

["The Pigman's Legacy" is] a mystery of sorts and also a tale of second chances for both John and Lorraine, not to mention the puzzled beneficiary of their ministrations and an elderly cleaning woman whom they bring into their derring-do. But … it's a rousing adventure yarn too. Mr. Zindel is an old hand at plunging from one episode to the next in such whirlwind fashion that a few implausibilities are concealed along the way. Here he deepens his narrative by alternating na...

[The protagonists of The Pigman, John and Lorraine,] have two great bonds: they are both in conflict with their parents Paul Zindel 1936– © 1983 Martha Swopeand they both have capricious and inventive minds. Out of this comes their friendship with an elderly man they call the Pigman (his name is Pignati and he collects china pigs) whom they met when pretending to be collecting for a charity. They are not criminal, but John and ...

It seems that a good story will not lie down; and there are not that many around. After The Pigman, The Pigman's Legacy (followed, I suppose by The Pigman's Return), several titles and 11 years later, Paul Zindel picks up John and Lorraine. He finds them almost as fresh and eccentric as they were just before the Pigman died…. [The Pigman's Legacy has] a much simpler plot. All the old man does is die; and all the children do is make his final days a little easier. The cycle of bir...

[The Pigman is] a "now" book, a thoroughly contemporary, sensitive—and shocking—first novel. Lorraine and John are high-school sophomores: Are they villains or victims? Wild, wise kids whose selfish, irresponsible actions cause an old man's death? Or frightened children, clinging to the never-never land of their Staten Island childhood, prolonging innocence with foolish clowning and silly games? At the edge of adulthood, escaping from the example set by neurosis-ridden, an...

John and Lorraine in The Pigman are not immediately attractive figures with whom to identify. They are out of sympathy with home and school, disturbed even, so that when they encounter old Mr. Pignati, who is senile, they are delighted to have him for a fairy godfather but unwilling to be responsible in their attitude to him. In their total absorption in their own needs they neglect his. This is an abrasive, tragic encounter: an unpleasant book in some ways, but the issues are starkly real. &#x...