(part 4 of 4) 1999: HOLES by Louis Sachar
Be strong, my weary wolf, turn around boldly./Fly high, my baby bird,/My angel, my only.
“Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that ‘Stanley Yelnats’ was spelled the same frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was an only child, as was every other Stanley Yelnats before him. All of them had something else in common. Despite their awful luck, they always remained hopeful. As Stanley’s father liked to say, ‘I learn from failure.’ But perhaps that was part of the curse as well. If Stanley and his father weren’t always hopeful, then it wouldn’t hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed.”
That’s Stanley’s redemptive quality in Holes, of course, is his hope. He - and the other Stanley Yelnatses before him - is someone who always acts as though things will work out the right way, even though it really never has worked out the right way, and even though Stanley really has no reason to believe it will work out the right way this time around.
One of the major plot points in Holes is Stanley teaching his fellow inmate Zero to read. Zero is a loner and sits at the bottom of the inmate hierarchy - Stanley even moves up a spot in the water line ahead of him at one point in the novel - and he’s never learned to read or write since he’s never gone to school (or lived in a house). But one thing leads to another, and the guards find out that Stanley has been teaching Zero to read in his spare time, and - in an extremely tense scene - the guards surround the boys out in the desert and interrogate them on why Stanley is teaching Zero, asking Zero what he’s learned, and mocking Zero when he doesn’t have the answers:
“The Warden turned to Zero. ‘Well, Zero, what have you learned so far?’
Zero said nothing…
Mr. Pendanski laughed. He picked up a shovel and said, ‘You might as well try to teach this shovel to read! It’s got more brains than Zero…
‘It causes him stress,’ said Mr. Pendanski. ‘I know you mean well, Stanley, but face it. Zero’s too stupid to learn to read. That’s what makes his blood boil. Not the hot sun.’
‘I’m not digging another hole,’ said Zero.
Mr. Pendanski handed him the shovel. ‘Here, take it, Zero. It’s all you’ll ever be good for.’
Zero took the shovel.
Then he swung it like a baseball bat.”
Zero attacks Mr. Pendanski - who deserves it - and runs off into the desert. That’s when most of the shit hits the fan in Holes. Stanley eventually runs away from Camp Green Lake to go find Zero before he dies of thirst. It doesn’t make sense for him to do it, just like it doesn’t make sense for Stanley to teach Zero to read in the first place, just like it doesn’t make sense for Stanley to really do anything, because Stanley and the Yelnats family are cursed, really and truly cursed, and every single good thing they try to do ends up blowing up in their faces and failing and sending this junior high school to a brutal prison camp where he suffers and gets mocked for helping his fellow inmate learn to read and will probably die of thirst trying to save that inmate’s life. But Stanley does it, knowing it’s probably going to make his life way worse, because it feels like the morally right thing to do.
And it is the right thing to do, of course, not just morally but supernaturally. If Stanley hadn’t gone after Zero, he never would have carried Zero up the mountain, sang to him, and formally broken the generations-long curse on his family. But also, if Stanley hadn’t taught Zero to read, he might never have gotten out of Camp Green Lake alive.
The climax of the novel comes in a scene set technically after the curse is broken, after Stanley has carried Zero up the mountain and sang to him, after reparations are made for the pig theft and God has lifted his anger from the Yelnats family. But the change in Stanley’s luck doesn’t become apparent right away: as Stanley and Zero try to sneak back into Camp Green Lake, they are caught almost immediately by the Warden and the other guards, and find themselves in a very tense standoff.
A lot of things happen at once in this scene: Stanley and Zero are caught and the Warden has made it clear that she has no problem having them both killed, but we also learn that Stanley has been exonerated and the state AG is on his way to release Stanley in a few hours, and Stanley and Zero have just found a buried suitcase in the desert but they don’t know what’s in it, but also everything has suddenly stopped moving forward because Stanley and Zero are stuck in this hole, surrounded by poisonous yellow-spotted lizards. For some reason, the lizards aren’t attacking Stanley and Zero - there are winding multiple-timeline-related reasons for this that become clear in the final chapter of the novel - but they’re freezing everyone up. Stanley and Zero are in the hole, possibly about to die from the lizards. Or, they’re about to die from the guns that the guards are pointing at them, guards that are openly wondering if it’s worth it to just shoot both of the kids. And the AG is coming. And there’s a suitcase in the hole and nobody knows what’s in it. And everyone’s just standing still. Like I said, it’s tense.
There are several parts of Holes that are gut-wrenching, and Stanley’s thoughts while he’s trapped in the hole might be at the top of the list for me. Stanley counts his heartbeats to remind himself that he’s still alive for another however many seconds. He thinks to himself:
“He didn’t want to die with the images of the Warden, Mr. Sir, and the lizards etched into his brain. Instead, he tried to see his mother’s face. His brain took him back to a time when he was very little, all bundled up in a snowsuit. He and his mother were walking, hand in hand, mitten in mitten, when they both slipped on some ice and fell and rolled down a snow-covered hillside. They ended up at the bottom of the hill. He remembered he almost cried, but instead he laughed. His mother laughed, too. He could feel the same light-headed feeling he felt then, dizzy from rolling down the hill. He felt the sharp coldness of the snow against his ear. He could see flecks of snow on his mother’s bright and cheery face. This was where he wanted to be where he died.”
Stanley is eleven, and his main preoccupation is what thought he’s going to have in his mind when he dies, which he assumes is going to be in the next few minutes. And he thinks of a nice time he had with his mother when he was younger. It’s heartbreaking. It’s very difficult to read, every time. Zero is next to Stanley in the hole, holding the mysterious locked suitcase, and we don’t know what he’s thinking about. We hear him mutter some strange non-sequiturs. At one point he says “Satan”. Then “Sa-tan lee”. And then, out of nowhere, with guns pointed at him and yellow-spotted lizards crawling over him, he asks Stanley “Is your last name your first name backwards?”
The AG and Stanley’s attorney finally show up and we get the full story: the judge had ordered Stanley’s release a day earlier, but now the Warden is trying to hang the mysterious suitcase on Stanley as theft of her property so she doesn’t have to let him go, and so Stanley won’t reveal the brutality that’s been going on at Camp Green Lake. The lizards eventually scurry away as the sun comes up, and the Warden tries to get her suitcase back:
“...she tried to take the suitcase from him [Zero].
He jerked it free. ‘It belongs to Stanley,’ he said.
‘Don’t cause any more trouble,’ the Warden warned. ‘You stole it from my cabin, and you’ve been caught red-handed. If I press charges, Stanley might have to return to prison. Now I’m willing, in view of all the circumstances, to-’
‘It’s got his name on it,’ said Zero.
Stanley’s lawyer pushed past the tall man to have a look.
‘See,’ Zero showed her. ‘Stanley Yelnats.’
Stanley looked, too. There, in big black letters, was STANLEY YELNATS.
The tall man looked over the heads of the others at the name on the suitcase. ‘You say he stole it from your cabin?’
The Warden stared at it in disbelief. ‘That’s im…imposs…it’s imposs…’ She couldn’t even say it.”
Eventually, the Warden spits out “You can’t even read” to Zero. But she doesn’t end up with the suitcase.
The suitcase doesn’t really belong to Stanley Yelnats IV, of course, but it did belong to Stanley Yelnats I, and then it was stolen from him by Kissin’ Kate Barlow, because Stanley I had been cursed with bad luck after breaking his magic pig promise. Then Kissin’ Kate Barlow was tortured and killed by the Walker family, leaving the suitcase buried in some unknown spot in the desert, a desert which exists because the rain stopped, and the rain stopped when the Walkers lynched Kate Barlow’s boyfriend. And then the Walker family dug for that lost suitcase for generations until the last Walker opened a child prison in the desert and became the Warden. But all of the pieces of this curse get broken in reverse. The Warden isn’t the Warden anymore as the state AG takes over and eventually shutters Camp Green Lake. It starts to rain again in the desert. The buried treasure is taken out from the Walkers’ land, and returned specifically to the great-great-grandson of Stanley Yelnats. Stanley Yelnats IV snaps his family’s streak of bad luck because he finally fulfills the magic pig promise.
But there’s this other piece that’s important: Stanley didn’t just fulfill the terms of the pig promise. Stanley taught Zero to read. Because Stanley taught Zero to read, because Stanley acted kindly and hopefully against any indication that he should do so in the cruel and unforgiving world of Camp Green Lake, Zero recognized Stanley’s name on the suitcase in the hole. It's not just the complex multi-step process of breaking an Egyptian curse that saves Stanley, it's doing something right with the hope that the something may count someday. It’s helping someone else when you’re in a punishing torture camp and there’s no reason to help anyone, ever. It’s giving of yourself when every other time you’ve given of yourself has ended in disaster. But this time may be the one time that keeps you alive, that keeps the person next to you alive, that finally flips the balance of divine justice. The world is boiling, the human race is butchering each other, and all I can do is go out every day and try to do something right. Because maybe we’re all cursed, but maybe this is going to be the day we finally break the curse.
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. Newburied will return in mid-May.