Young Adult fiction (or YA) is today one of the most successful sectors in the publishing industry. Which makes it somewhat difficult to believe that it didn’t even exist until the late 1960’s. Making this even more difficult to believe is the fact that it is hogwash. No matter what anyone else tries to tell you, authors have been writing novels directed toward young adult readers for almost as long as the novel has existed. If you haven’t actually read them, you almost certainly have at least heard of some young adults written before the 1960’s: Emma, Black Beauty, Catcher in the Rye. All of these—and many others—are novels featuring characters or a storyline that have enticed younger readers for more than a century. The difference between them and novels like Holes, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and The Hunger Games lies not in the writing or reading part of the novel, but that section which exists in between: marketing and publishing.
The Pigman is one of those titles that is often pointed to as the first “true YA novel” and it is certainly much closer to being so than something like Little House on the Prairie or Sarah Plain and Tall. Novels have been primarily directed toward a younger demographic throughout the history of the form, but never—or at least very rarely—exclusively so. Laura Ingalls Wilder may have been writing for a young audience, but her publishers selling her books to an adult audience. Two novels published in successive years changed everything: The Outsiders and The Pigman.
Zindel’s novel is really the game changer, here, however. Even its very title situates the characters in The Outsiders as standing apart within the world of teens and young adults. All those guys with the funny nicknames and greasy hair are stereotypical “bad boys.” John and Lorraine, on the other hand, are almost excruciatingly “average” or, perhaps, just slightly above average, but very typical, nonetheless. They are not juvenile delinquents or problem kids from the wrong side of the tracks. They are good kids from solid middle class families who are not even suffering from the existential against of dealing with an affluent family like Holden Caulfield. Holden’s reaction to the world seems so extraordinarily out of sync with his living conditions as to make him, for a great many readers, more of a privileged whiner than an antihero. Holden Caulfield—now there’s a problem kid, for you. But John and Lorraine do not even suffer from his condition.
And yet, both are troubled kids. The Pigman may not have been the first novel to depict average everyday “good kids” being disrespectful to teachers, talking back to parents, drinking, smoking and disobeying authority, but it almost certainly was one of the first in which such teens were not either punished as the climax or punished with their subsequent redemption as the climax. The Pigman is structured as dual narratives which presents half the book through John’s eyes and half the book through Lorraine’s and this deliberate in narrative perspective reflects the underlying divergence between previous novels enjoyed by young adults and the invention of the YA genre featuring books aimed at young adults.
Perspective is everything in telling a story because what happened is really on the truth according to the teller. Previous books designed for younger readers almost universally feature a narrative perspective—even when related in the first person by a young character—informed by the morality of the adult author. This is why so many stories about delinquents and problem kids and those from the wrong side of the tracks insist on a framework of punishment and, usually, redemptive. They exist not just as stories, but instructional texts. The Pigman does away with that, reducing the perspective down to the eyes of the young participants and jettisoning the requirement that John and Lorraine must face externally imposed punishment for their misbehavior. Their punishment comes from within, springing forth from their empathy and own particular set of values and morals. This is how we recognize them as being, unlike Norton Kelly, good kids.
