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 sounds so quaint.

Mrs. Brown never had to implement a policy like the one now enforced at the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis, where sexually explicit YA books parents find objectionable are 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 existence at the turn of the twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than surviving 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.  Well, yes, the characters in Penrod didn’t hook up, enjoy recreational chemicals in excess, or experience gender dysporia so the novel looks more wholesome.  On the other hand, in the early 1900s a white middle-class eleven-year-old boy left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today could get in serious trouble without much difficulty.   He has the freedom to act on ideas that make his mother worry if he is headed for the  penitentiary.   Certain families forbid their sons to associate with him. Tongues wag at the Schofields’ inability to control him.  Some of his peers take vicarious pleasure in his antics, like talking back to the teacher and managing to elude punishment temporarily with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, who has taken refuge from her drunken, abusive husband with the Schofield–a tall tale inspired by the silent film he watched instead of doing to Sunday school.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered anodyne, is a typical episode showing Penrod acting 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. in the stable put out for the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” using 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 wish it were possible to administer a dose to Professor Bartlett, so the cotillion would be cancelled.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by.  Penrod decides on a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he can squire the adored Marjorie Jones and hand off his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets.  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.   Maurice swallows it all, has a smoke, and heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for cotillion.

If Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley, Tarkington didn’t come out and say so.  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 proposes to his best friend Sam they could be the star attractions of a show, to which admission will be charged.

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.  Growing up I reread Penrod multiple times and not because I had been fooled into thinking it was a wholesome read.  My mother assumed me capable to 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 again made me wonder if Tarkington was criticized in his day for crossing a line for including the relationship between the white and black boys…

George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue is notorious as the author’s account of his search for a meaningful, fulfilled life as a gay man and it includes his coming of age sexually.   What the book’s critics and would-be–censors neglect to say (probably because they haven’t read it), is that it’s also a warm, 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.  The book 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.  Don’t damn a book without giving the author a chance and don’t praise it without a detailed sense of how the strengths and weaknesses may be intertwined.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex than its reputation.