Author: Louis Sachar

Publisher: Listening Library

Pub. in: May, 2006

ISBN: 0739331760

Pages:  

Measurements: 5.6 x 4.9 x 1 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BB00085

Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0739331767

Language: American English

Winner of the prestigious National Book Award and the Newbery Medal.

This novel turns thematically on the words of a lullaby that a family passes down through four generations. Right at the start of that descent, somebody twists the words around from the way they were suppposed to be, and the meaning gets twisted right around, too. The lullaby originally extolled what you might call natural virtue: "fly high, my angel, my only." As debased, it extolled a sheepishly grinning fatalism: "'if only, if only,' while the wolves howl outside the door" (in my slight paraphrase). That contortion provides all the thematic emotional force the book contains. The original, undebased version of the lullaby appears on the last page of the book. You close the book with the contrast of the two versions ringing in your ears.

The rest of the book vaguely foreshadows that eventual revelatory contrast by constantly pointing out people's fatalism and the evil it gives rise to: by first conniving at evil, then rationalizing evil, and eventually masterminding evil. The problem is that the two literary devices have no unifying principle: they coexist without cooperating. The poetic tension of the pair of lullabies hangs over the spectacle of the narrative like a great painting hung high on a wall in a gallery full of people who are all ignoring it in their gaucherie and philistinism. Given that my metaphorical painting condemns gaucherie and philistinism, this would not be a total artistic loss. However, unlike the gallery-goers, whom we may condemn for their claiming to be cultured, to be sighted, while they rhapsodize in their blindness, the reader of "Holes" as well as its characters have apparently come upon their crassitude through no fault of their own. I speak now of the life the reader shares with the characters in the course of the narrative. They and we have apparently been so beaten down by life so that their and our fatalism is as ordinary as spit. The notion that our fatalism is somehow our own work hangs over us uncomprehendingly, and we of it.

That duality of theme, or discordancy between narrative and theme, betokens, I fear, another discordancy in the book: children read for action, adults read for meaning. This leads to a third: the author inhabits a world of meaning, the reader inhabits a world of literary gimmicks. Thence, the ultimate: the aristocrat acts upon the truth, the proletariat is acted upon by the truth. If literature is worth anything, is anything, it is the desire of people to see their lives and themselves in the round, as they go, so that they may judge the lives they live even while they live them. Literature is never anything more than a fable told by a cranky old person to children who may not want to hear. If the old person is unwilling to bend down and join in the narrative course of the children, as it were, in order to weave the fable's theme into the theme of the children's lives, the fable has no life in it. One published review called the book a shaggy dog story. I think perhaps that that technique only works with jokes. This book leaves me resentful that the author did not put himself down into the words, but only stuck himself on at the end, like a celebrity's cameo public service announcement stuck on to the end of a TV movie that deals with a social ill. I don't doubt that Mr. Sachar did his best. That's the way fatalism works. Here's my "word from our sponsor": the opposite of fatalism is not determination and exuberance,which Mr. Sachar seems to be full of. It is conscience, which I define as that sensibility for the tiniest loose end, the naryest hard pea under twenty nine feather mattresses, the response to which loose end and hard pea finally turns a bewildered old man into the tragic hero of Shakespeare's King Lear.

In the case of "Holes", the author almost admits that he and his hero, Stanley Yelnats, may leave the book as bewildered as they began it ... "if only, if only, the moon speaks no reply; reflecting the sun and all that's gone by. Be strong my weary wolf, turn around boldly. Fly high, my baby bird, my angel, my only." It is not enough to be a good wolf, and a good baby bird. One must be a good person, and that involves, what do they call it, a morbid sensitivity to nuance of expression and quality of theme.

(From quoting Roger, USA)

Target readers: Good for children, teens and adults, but especially good for boys aged 9-12. As a reader puts it, " Great for a young or older reader with an appreciation for unwashed bodies, cheesy toes, concentration camps and wicked wardens."