“There’s no place to hide from the prophecy.”
-The Mountain Goats
Here’s the pitch: it’s a children’s novel, set at a juvenile prison. Like, a very bad juvenile prison. They are torturing and abusing children there, disappearing children, beating them, depriving them of water in the middle of the Texas desert. The major themes we’re going to explore in the book? Well, there’s racial tension in there, the labor exploitation inherent to the prison-industrial complex, generational cycles of failure, and overall, of course, we’ll be looking at ideas of divine punishment and retribution in great detail, all against the backdrop of a vast and barren wasteland where we choose to torture our children because our other civic institutions have failed over and over.
Again, I’d peg the audience for this around fifth or sixth grade.
And don’t worry, we have the best possible guy to write it, he’s mostly known for slapstick comedy books like Sideways Stories From Wayside School. Oh, also, there’s three separate timelines and we’re going to tell everything out of order.
Not only is this all going to work, it’s going to work better than most children’s novels in history have ever worked.
Very few children's books are as good as 1999 Newbery medalist and National Book Award winner Holes, Louis Sachar's sprawling novel to close the final decade when children's publishing would have been considered a "stable" "industry". No children's novel can even come close to Holes on sheer narrative ambition. The amount of story that Sachar was able to fit into a 233-page novel, the weight of the themes he shared with his young readers, the breadth of the cast of characters across multiple timelines, and the fact that he did all of this after a decades-long career of writing mostly comedic novels - very good novels, but miles away, tonally, from Holes - all blow away the previous seventy-four novels I’ve read for the newsletter. The fact that the novel exists at all, let alone is so decorated, is a major buttress to my faith in the human race to create good and beautiful things out of letters. So here’s what actually happens in the book:
The protagonist of Holes is Stanley Yelnats IV, an extremely unlucky middle schooler who has just been sentenced to 18 months at the Camp Green Lake juvenile correctional camp in the Texas desert. He's fat, he's bullied, he's lonely, his family is living precariously because his dad is an unsuccessful inventor, and he hasn't even done anything wrong: he was wrongfully accused and convicted of stealing a pair of sneakers from a charity auction. And now he's shacking up with abrasive cellmates - they have nicknames like Armpit and Zero and X-Ray, and eventually give Stanley the nickname "Caveman" - and enduring the cruel guards, tasked with digging one five-foot hole out in the desert every day as part of the camp's "rehabilitation" program. It is a bizarre and bruising punishment for all of the boys, and although the camp maintains that this is the sort of thing that builds character in young men, the apparent non-sequitur of the punishment and a few interesting actions by the guards lead Stanley to start wondering if Camp Green Lake is really trying to rehabilitate their inmates, or if they’re trying to find something buried in the desert.
Oops, we have to jump back a few generations. On page 28 of the novel, we meet Elya Yelnats, Stanley's great-great-grandfather in Latvia, who has also, maybe, been wrongfully accused of theft. Elya, in an attempt to win over a comely Latvian girl, has made a deal with Egyptian mystic Madame Zeroni1, and all he has to do to hold up his end of the deal and win the girl is properly care for a pig and then eventually carry Madame Zeroni up a mountain and sing a lullaby to her. It’s weird, but it’s magic, so whatever. Of course, Elya screws up and doesn’t hold up his end of the deal, and it’s possible that he ended up cursing himself and his descendants with bad luck for all eternity because he screwed up with the pig and blew off his promise to Zeroni. I mean, that’s probably not it, curses aren't real, certainly not curses based on failed pig transactions.
But it is kind of hard to get past the fact that Stanley’s family has been comically unlucky ever since, and that, as a recurring family joke, they keep blaming things on “his dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-grandfather”. That great-grandfather made a killing in the stock market but lost it all to the infamous stagecoach robber “Kissin’ Kate Barlow”. Stanley’s father is an aspiring inventor but has never been able to make money off of anything. And Stanley was walking home from school when a pair of stolen sneakers fell out of the sky and hit him on the head, setting off a chain of events where he’d be wrongfully accused and convicted of stealing them.
Oops, sorry, we have to jump back a hundred and ten years again.
On page 101, we’re thrown back to Camp Green Lake before it was destroyed by a century-long drought, and the romance between schoolteacher Katherine Barlow and Sam, the local onion salesman2. The problem is that Katherine is white and Sam is black, which was not cool in Texas a hundred and ten years ago, so Sam is lynched by other townspeople, and the drought begins. The first Camp Green Lake-ian to see Kate and Sam kissing hisses “God will punish you!” at them, but four pages later, after Sam’s death, Sachar interjects into the narrative to confront us: “That all happened one hundred and ten years ago. Since then, not one drop of rain has fallen on Green Lake. You make the decision: Whom did God punish?”
Maybe God is punishing all of the characters in Holes. Maybe God has punished four generations of the Yelnats family because a Latvian peasant didn’t take good care of a pig, although that seems insane. Maybe God is punishing an entire town for a century because of their prejudice, which would also strike me as very strange but more understandable than the pig thing. Holes looks directly at the theme of divine punishment, a theme that you never expect children’s novels to tackle, and certainly not to tackle so originally. And, most importantly, what makes Holes such a triumph is that the characters can find a way out of it.
In an earlier piece, I talked a little bit about the common structural elements I saw in the best Newbery medalists, the best childrens’ novels of all time. The best medalists are fish-out-of-water stories, which Holes certainly is; Stanley is not the kind of kid - demographically, socially - that ever saw himself in a juvenile prison, so he, and the reader, are doing a lot of learning on the fly as to how the realities of prison work. The best medalists explore complex American issues through the eyes of a child in order to talk about these issues using simple and accessible language; obviously, that’s related to the previous point, as we get a glimpse of the American mass incarceration crisis through Camp Green Lake, and eventually see Camp Green Lake - and, by extension, the entire prison system - as a vehicle for labor exploitation on a massive scale.
And the third structural element was that the best medalists have a sense of stakes and justice. Things that happen in the novel matter, and by the end, the things that matter have gotten better. Holes’ narrative structure is ambitious and unconventional, but Sachar still built this ambitious and unconventional book on these three pillars. The things that happen in Holes do matter: Camp Green Lake is a very bad place where very bad people are doing very bad things to children. We find our main character there, possibly, because God has decided to punish him and the town he’s been shipped to. And by the end of the novel, things have changed. There is, as it turns out, a way to get back into God’s good graces.
Stanley slowly befriends the other boys in his cell block, most notably Zero, whom Stanley starts teaching how to read and write. Because, even though Zero is early in his teens, he’s been unhoused most of his life, is a ward of the state, and never went to school, so he’s just ended up in the prison system and unable to read because that’s where kids like him end up, and now he’s being tortured out in the desert every day, forced to dig holes for some mysterious purpose. And Zero eventually gets fed up with everything and makes a break for it, and Stanley soon finds himself going after Zero in an attempt to find him before he dies of thirst. After a grueling journey through the desert, the two fugitives eventually arrive at a spring on top of a lone mountain and can finally get themselves hydrated. Zero is near death at this climactic moment in the novel, so Stanley has to carry him up to the top of the mountain and get him some water, and absentmindedly sings Zero an old lullaby as he does so.
Zero is Hector Zeroni, the great-great-great-grandson of Madame Zeroni. A century ago, Stanley’s great-great-grandfather promised to do an act of kindness for Zero’s great-great-great-grandmother, and he never did, and the Yelnats family was cursed for generations. But because of that curse, Stanley IV made a friend, and because Stanley IV was Stanley IV, he decided to be kind to his friend and teach him how to read, and refused to abandon him or let him die when things got dire, and he inadvertently ended up fulfilling that old broken promise, he accidentally did the one thing that could break the curse when a Yelnats carried a Zeroni up the mountain and sang to him. And so, in the novel’s final pages, and with the curse broken, we see the old wrongs get righted: Elya Yelnats’ lost fortune is found again, and Stanley III finally finds a meaningful breakthrough in his work, and it rains in Camp Green Lake for the first time in decades. The God of Holes has a long memory and is apparently pretty vengeful, but Stanley IV makes that long memory work for him when he comes through for Zero.
A story about a person being kind in a cruel and vicious system can be very powerful by itself. That story, built on the pillars of other successful children’s novels - fish out of water, complex social issue through the eyes of a child, stakes and justice - well, that’s a good recipe for a Newbery winner. But fitting all of this into a three-dimensional puzzle and putting the idea of divine justice at the center, that’s something that only Holes could pull off.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the first of four installments on Louis Sachar's 1999 medalist, Holes.
Portrayed in the 2003 film adaptation of Holes by, incredibly, Eartha Kitt.
Kate and Sam were, memorably, portrayed in the film adaptation of Holes by Patricia Arquette and Dule Hill. Look, the film was impressively faithful to the novel’s complex plot and had a very stacked cast; Jon Voight and Henry Winkler and Siobhan Hogan and Tim Blake Nelson all have roles as well, but the thing everyone remembers about the movie is that Shia LaBeouf raps over the end credits.