Roald Dahl, not just for kids

Short stories and novels discussed: James and the Giant Peach, George’s Marvelous Medicine, Boy, The Umbrella Man, Lamb to the Slaughter, Galloping Foxley. Spoiler-free

I’ve always thought that one of the worst things that gets set aside when entering the high school reading curriculum is a sense of enjoyment. Sure, a lot of the novels we read are “the greats” but so much of the focus is on their potential to be analyzed, to be referenced in essays and exams, and so little on whether we actually enjoy them.

When it comes to literature, something being classed as part of the literary canon almost frees it from any possible critique. Either you enjoyed it and you truly understand what art is, or you didn’t and you clearly just didn’t get it. When it comes to more popular fiction, we are allowed to have tastes. We are allowed to say “oh I just didn’t really like Girl on the Train. I’m not that into thrillers,” but heaven help you if you say you didn’t enjoy Ulysses because you found it rambled a lot. I’m not even saying we need to pit “popular fiction” and “literary fiction” against each other (and that’s not just because the concept we have of literary fiction is very white male-centric; that’s a discussion for another day). I just think that there is a point in which students stop getting asked the question “did you like the book you read?” Fun and enjoyment stop mattering.

When we are in elementary school, the books our teachers read out loud to us are rarely boring. In fact, their entertainment value is amongst their most prized quality. How else are you going to get kids into reading? I was in elementary school when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I fell in love with books, with stories. I found myself with the itch to create my own. We had a yearly writing contest throughout the entire school section and every student participated. It was mandatory, yes, but overall not percieved as a chore.

The problem with only reading highly literary works throughout high school is that it creates this image of literature as something ineffable. How am I, a high school student, meant to write the next Catcher in the Rye, the next Handmaid’s Tale? Books don’t only exist to be analyzed. Most people read because they enjoy it, first and foremost.

Enter Roald Dahl. Tried and tested. Children love his books. They are gruesome, unpatronizing tales of young boys traveling in a giant peach along insect companions, of children creating a medicine out of the strange chemicals they find in their household. They were the kind of books I loved to read that made me want to write. As I grew up, I was delighted to find out that Roald Dahl’s writing wasn’t just for children. He had dozens of short stories published, targeted at adults.

It is these short stories that I think should make it onto the high school curriculum. When I was in a high school creative writing club, every short story anyone produced always centered around a twist, a surprise ending. That’s the kind of story you like writing when you’re fifteen. Gotcha stories. And Roald Dahl, in his adult fiction, is the master of the twist. To quote David L. Ulin from the New Yorker, “At the same time, Dahl comes off as more knowing, or perhaps more winking, as if he and we, a writer and his readers, were in cahoots together. For him, the act of storytelling, at its heart, is a collaborative game.” Part of the charm of Dahl is the way his stories make you, the reader, feel like you were part of the process. They’re fun. They make you want to create something like that.

The other benefit of short stories, of course, is that they’re short and they are plentiful. If you like one, there is another waiting, equally tantalizing. There is still plenty to analyze in Dahl as well. “The Umbrella Man” speaks to subversion of expectation, while placing the reader in the same shoes as the protagonist. We can focus on the power of diction in “Lamb to the Slaughter” as it has the most masterful use of the word giggled I’ve ever encountered. You can talk about the nature of biographical writing by comparing “Galloping Foxley” to excerpts from Dahl’s autobiography Boy. The point is the style of story produced by Dahl is the kind of story teenagers like to write, when they do. It is important to show how the process of reading and of writing can be fun, can be eye-winking tongue-in-cheek proud-of-yourself work. It can be indulgent. As long as it starts somewhere.

Reading and writing have a symbiotic relationship. The more you do of one, the better you are at the other. If we find ourselves reading things we truly enjoy, things that mirror the kind of work we want to create, we feed the creative impulse to write. And it is so healthy to write. One study found that expressive writing can be instrumental in processing trauma. Another that practicing writing can have great positive effects in self-esteem, in logical thinking, and reduce neural blockages caused by the stress of boredom.

So many people graduate high school thinking they don’t like to read. Worse are the people who read daily, who always have a book on the go, but think it doesn’t “count” because it isn’t part of that literary canon we’ve been taught to value. It’s too fun to actually be literature. As children, we write the stories we want to hear. As adults graduating high school, so many of us lose that urge. Something needs to be done in later school years to reminds students that writing, like reading, really is fun.