When my mother hinted that the books in the children’s section were too easy for me, it was time to find something in the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf looked interesting and I pulled down one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers, cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out without incident. The next time I presented a book from the adult section to the checkout desk, Mrs. Brown was the supervisor and refused to let me have it until she cleared it with my mother, who coolly confirmed I had her permission. Mrs. Brown did not approve.  Now their  one-on-one confrontation over my reading selections sounds so quaint.

I am pretty sure that Mrs. Brown never had to implement a policy like the one now in effect at the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis, where parents can ask that YA books they find sexually explicit be relocated in the adult section.   In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish” in connection with the beloved Indianapolis writer John Green.  His acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars have been targeted for depicting teenagers struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness, and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink, and drive.  Green denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order.”

Lee weighed in by comparing Green’s work with Penrod, the classic novel of Hoosier boyhood by Booth Tarkington.   Lee suggested that Penrod’s boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than attendance at cotillions.  “He knew what bathroom to use, quips Lee, before continuing with:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Lee’s glib suggestions that yesterday’s classics still reflect the realities of young people’s lives did readers a disservice.  Yes, the characters in Penrod didn’t hook up, enjoy recreational chemicals in excess, or experience gender dysporia so superficially the novel looks more wholesome than Green’s Looking for Alaska.  Actually Penrod, a white middle-class eleven-year-old during the 1900s had something important in common with Green’s characters.  He was also left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today and had no difficulty getting into serious trouble and with that freedom, he acted on ideas that made his mother worry that he was headed for the  penitentiary.   Certain families forbade their sons to associate with him. Adult tongues might wag at the Schofields’ inability to rein him in, but kids his age obviously took vicarious pleasure in his antics.  He could talk back to the teacher and manage temporarily to elude punishment with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, staying with the Schofields to escape her drunken, abusive husband.  The tall tale was inspired by the silent film Penrod watched when he was supposed to be in Sunday school.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered inoffensive, is a typical caper where Penrod acts on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc.put out in the stable to be hauled away with the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, pharmacist Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” with the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Tester dog Duke can’t keep it down and the boys dream of administering a dose to Professor Bartlett, so the cotillion would be cancelled due to poisoning.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by (Maurice’s family is wealthier than either Sam or Penrod’s and the last name suggests that he is Jewish.)  Penrod decides on a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he can squire the adored Marjorie Jones at the cotillion.  He will graciously transfer his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets due to illness in the family.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted for the real one when he isn’t looking.   Maurice takes a deep breath and glugs it all down.  After a leisurely smoke, he heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for the dance.

Tarkington says nothing about how Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley.  What strikes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately suggests to Sam the brothers could be the star attractions of a show to which the impresarios will charge admission.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after their victory to say thank you.

Daniel Lee’s pronouncement that Tarkington’s Penrod is a book written back in the good old days when children were still children sounds as if he relied on a Wikipedia plot summary instead of reading it.  Classic books should have a place alongside contemporary problem YA novels, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a retreat into nostalgia, especially ones like Penrod, which belong to the all-American genre of novels about bad boys.  Growing up I reread Penrod multiple times and nobody tried to fool me into it was an anodyne story.  My mother assumed I was more than capable of realizing that emulating the boys (or girly girly Marjorie) would be ridiculous because Tarkington’s Indiana was a different time and place.

Looking at Penrod now made me wonder if critics took down Tarkington for crossing a line in the scenes between the white and black boys…  Were they transgressive by the standards then?  Were some children made uncomfortable or angry reading about them?  Now the lines are drawn in the sand at different places. George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue is notorious as an account of a young Black’s search for a meaningful, fulfilled life as a gay man.  What the book’s critics  are quick to point out that it includes a chapter about Johnson’s coming of age sexually, they neglect to note that the memoir is also a  loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  (Penrod certainly doesn’t express comparable feelings about his long-suffering mother and sister.)  All Boys is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages. How many would-be censors and commentators actually take the time to read carefully the books they write about instead of cherry-picking from the contents?  One problematic passage shouldn’t be enough to damn a book: all authors deserve a chance to make their case with readers.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex (and mixed) than its reputation: when a cultural commentator brings books front and center of cultural skirmishes, he or she owes the author and readers a considered opinion, not glib characterizations.