1997: THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY by E.L. Konigsburg
Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers.
[If you still care about this sort of thing, this piece does contain a very big spoiler for the Harry Potter series. You shouldn't still care about this sort of thing.]
After my first daughter was born, as she was up feeding late at night, I read all seven Harry Potter books to her out loud. This was mainly to pass the time; like everyone else my age, I loved the books growing up, and I camped out for the midnight releases for the last two books, but they definitely don't hold the same revered place in my brain that they used to, for several reasons. When you read the books as an adult, you find that it's a lot easier to spot all of the gaping plot holes that get explained away with "well, this is…very old magic" and JK Rowling's tendency to end each of her books by having Dumbledore explain everything over the course of a twenty-page monologue; by the final book, Dumbledore is dead, but Harry does briefly travel to the afterlife to get his traditional chapter-long direct explanation of what the hell is going on with the story. And of course, these flaws, which can be endearing in their own way, are now overshadowed by JK Rowling's stupid cash grabs, from the lazy Fantastic Beasts film series to the truly idiotic Cursed Child play. And then those, in turn, are overshadowed by Rowling's appalling political beliefs and her complete inability to keep them to herself.
But there are plenty of reasons why these books were so popular. For one thing, they are very funny; the dry British wit Rowling uses to describe the wizarding world and build the back-and-forth between the characters does work really well from a comedic perspective. Many of the characters in the series - Hermione, Hagrid, Snape, Luna, Malfoy, hell, even Slughorn or Umbridge - are great fantasy characters and I have fun spending time with them. And - I think, most importantly - by seeing Harry in this magical world, readers got the very attractive message that "if you feel like you're weird or you don't belong, there's a place for you where you're welcome and special and valued as you are". Rowling didn't invent this message, and she has since put a lot of effort into clarifying that she believes that this message does not apply to real things that make people feel excluded like gender norms, and in fact only applies to literal wizard magic that doesn't exist, but it is a message that resonates with young readers and that appears in countless novels for children.
When my second daughter was born and I was once again looking for stuff to read out loud late at night, I stared at my bookshelf and excavated a paperback that I hadn't read in decades. It was the Newbery medalist for 1997 - the same year the first Harry Potter book came out and began reshaping children's publishing - and was also about kids the same age as Harry - and, presumably, the same age as most of the novel's readers - kids who also felt like they were weird or didn't belong. But instead of getting welcomed into a witty and magical and special world, the kids in this book kind of stay weird and outcast, occasionally visit their grandparents in Florida, and remain mildly annoying to the people around them.
The book was strange.
Part of what makes 1997 medalist The View From Saturday strange is its unusual structure for a children's novel. E.L. Konigsburg constructed the novel out of previous half-ideas and unused short story drafts, so the book is very fragmented and episodic. The easiest comparison to make is to the movie Slumdog Millionaire, since both works involve a brown person at a trivia contest having frequent flashbacks.
In this book, though, the trivia contest is the regional championships for junior high quiz bowl teams in Albany, New York. The novel opens at the championships, and as each question gets read, one of the four sixth-grade team members from Epiphany Middle School (the name is on the nose, but so was JK Rowling naming a villain "Umbridge") flashes back to some recent life experience that helped them learn what the correct answer was. As the flashbacks continue, the reader learns about the overlapping connections between the four gifted-kid-stereotype team members, and their bond with their coach, a woman who just returned to teaching ten years after a car accident paralyzed her from the waist down.
The View From Saturday is well-written and very compelling; as I was reading the book out loud to my newborn, I found my eye skipping over to the next page several times throughout the book because I was so curious to see how the story was going to develop. I really only have one critique of the book, which is pretty minor: I cannot think of a single reason why a child would enjoy this.
The members of the Epiphany quiz bowl team - the lead characters - while realistic depictions of the kind of middle schoolers that would be on a successful quiz bowl team, are insufferable. We are first introduced to Noah Gershom, whose main hobby is calligraphy, narrating a story about how his mother was making him write a thank-you note (here called a bread-and-butter or “B & B” letter) to his grandparents for hosting him in Florida that summer:
“I told her that, with all due respect, I did not think I owed Grandma and Grandpa a B & B. And then I stated my case. Fact: I was not just a houseguest, I was family, and fact: I had not been their houseguest by choice because fact: She had sent me to them because she had won a cruise for selling more houses in Epiphany than anyone else in the world and if she had shared her cruise with Joey and me instead of with her husband, my father, I would not have been sent to Florida in the first place and fact: She, not me, owed them thanks, and further fact: I had been such a wonderful help while I was there that Grandma and Grandpa would probably want to write me a B & B.”
Perhaps you read the beginning of Noah’s chapter and are excited to learn more about this character and his motivations, or, more likely, you really want to punch him in the face, and will continue wanting to punch him in the face because this is how he talks throughout the novel, without really changing or growing at any point. In fairness to Konigsburg, at least two of the other quiz bowl team members seem ready to punch Noah in the face as well, so it’s possible that Konigsburg was well aware of how annoying Noah would seem to a reader, or another character, or really anyone else.
Those two teammates are Nadia and Ethan, whose respective hobbies are volunteering to protect sea turtles and secretly enjoying musical theater. Nadia loves her dog and Ethan has the longest commute to school. These characters are fine, and less insufferable, and more relatable than Noah.
But there’s nobody quite like Julian Singh, the final member of the quiz bowl team and the one who ends up bringing the team together. Julian is an Indian-British boy who moves to town after his father, a former cruise ship chef, buys a B&B and settles in upstate New York. Julian loves close-up magic and tiny ivory figurines and Lewis Carroll and hosting tea ceremonies and deciding that his paraplegic teacher needs his help. When a bully scrawls “I AM A ASS” on Julian’s backpack in permanent marker, Julian turns it into “I AM A PASSENGER ON SPACESHIP EARTH”, which made me, an adult man who is aware of the pernicious effects of bullying, want to bully Julian harder than anyone has ever been bullied before. Also, he got a very lucky break when his bully used the wrong article before “ASS".
Julian is unambiguously the hero of The View From Saturday, he is the character that readers are supposed to admire because he is so interesting and mysterious and wise. His big climactic moment is a prolonged argument with one of the quiz bowl judges over whether “tip” entered the English language as an acronym or not. That’s after he comes up with the nickname “The Souls” for his teammates, and after he gives them pennies to commemorate the founding of The Souls. This is the magical world that awaits you if you feel like an outcast, you get to give yourself a nickname and attend a tea party after a stranger tells you to look at a certain page in a library book for the invite, so that someday, you, too, can argue with a quiz bowl judge.
Julian - and his teammates - are also interested in helping Mrs. Olinski, for lack of a better term, get her groove back. They believe that their paraplegic teacher needs her confidence restored now that’s returned to teaching after a decade off, although they don’t, you know, ask her if that’s what she wants, and she at no point indicates that she’s having a personal problem that she would like four eleven-year-olds to help her with, and one of the big turning points for her is when she owns the sixth-grade bully in front of the class, by herself, without The Souls really contributing anything to it, which they don’t really need to, because she’s a perfectly capable adult who is smarter than a child. But after she scolds the bully, The Souls do this:
“Suddenly Nadia Diamondstein thrust her left leg straight out into the aisle. Noah Gershom, who was three seats in back of her, stuck out his right leg. Ethan Potter saw and raised his right arm in the air. As if on cue, Julan Singh raised his left fist. For a moment above and below eye level, all four limbs stuck out, and then, just as quickly all four disappeared. It was quite a balancing act.”
Yeah, I guess? Perhaps there are children who identified with this and liked seeing themselves in The View From Saturday. But I imagine it’s hard to see yourself in a book made up of story fragments that were supposed to live somewhere else, where everyone kind of ends up in the same place they were before, and where one of the main characters opens every sentence with “FACT” like a young Dwight Schrute. Oh, and also, a novel with a weird recurring joke about nooses.
Konigsburg's novel is often very witty - the quiz bowl hosts keep putting their feet in their mouths and there are some good laughs there - but there's also one extremely strange recurring joke that I can't get past. It starts when a principal at a rival school accosts Mrs. Olinski:
"Mr. LeDue applied his smile again and said, 'I told our coach she could expect to be hung if she lets your sixth grade grunges beat us out.'
'Well then,' Mrs. Olinski replied, 'much as I respect your coach, I recommend that you start buying rope.' She shifted her head slightly and added, 'By the way, Mr. LeDue, in our grunge neighborhood, we say hanged, not hung. Check it out.'"
Okay, that does feel very realistic to me, as a snappy comeback that a junior high teacher would make. The problem comes after Epiphany wins that match:
"Crushing applause followed a nanosecond of crushing silence. Everyone clapped. But not the sixth-grade sentinels who lined the walls. Instead, upon a signal from Michael Froelich, they took from their pockets a piece of rope, which they pinned on their shirts in the place where a medal would go."
I do feel a little uncomfortable that Konisgburg called back to "lol, someone's going to get hanged" but it's not like anyone does anything truly horrifying like hang a noose on a car, at least not until further down the same page where that exact thing happens:
"...the sixth graders converged and formed a phalanx that lifted her - wheelchair and all - onto their shoulders and carried her out of the building and into the parking lot. Two of the boys stopped short of Mrs. Olinski's van. One was Michael Froelich. He hopped on top of the other fellow's shoulder and draped a noose over the antenna of Mrs. Olinski's van."
Okay, now this is starting to make me very uncomfortable. And then, two chapters later, when the Epiphany team needs to raise gas money to get to Albany:
"They commissioned Bella Dubinsky to design a T-shirt. At the suggestion of Mr. Froelich, she drew a noose. Nothing else. Sadie Gershom suggested that she put the name of the school under that. Bella refused. 'Less is more,' she said."
What! You're just going to have everyone wear shirts with nooses on them! Are you serious! I honestly don't think this is a just a me-being-squeamish-because-it's-2022 thing, I think nooses carried some pretty heavy connotations by 1997! Do not wear coordinated noose shirts to the regional quiz bowl tournament for middle schoolers!
The View From Saturday is Konigsburg's second book to win the Newbery; she had also won the award three decades (!) earlier with the legendary From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. That book will have its own entry on here someday, but you probably remember the main plot point, which is that a precocious twelve-year-old girl and her little brother decide to run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The protagonist is a girl who feels weird and feels like she doesn't belong in the world, so she puts herself in a new world filled with art to admire, fountains to bathe in, and mysteries to solve. Again, "if you feel like you're weird or you don't belong, there's a place for you where you're welcome and special and valued as you are" is an attractive message for readers, especially young readers. But The View From Saturday just leaves off the entire second half of that sentence. The protagonists all feel like outcasts, and the new world they get to travel to is an auditorium near the state capitol where they get to argue over acronyms. “If you feel like you're weird or you don't belong, maybe you’re right, and also nooses are a good runner joke" is not a message that ever really took off for middle grade readers.
I was absolutely the target audience for this book when it came out. I was the right age, I already had a weird interest in reading every Newbery winner, my mother also made me write a lot of thank you notes, and I was literally the captain of my eighth grade quiz bowl team. Over twenty years later, I remembered absolutely nothing from this book, and I can still tell you every plot hole in every Harry Potter book. This isn't to say that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone should have won the Newbery over this book; it shouldn't have for several reasons, and it couldn't have because it's British. Konigsburg was a better and more thoughtful writer than Rowling - it's not close - but ultimately, The View From Saturday is made of fragments, and those fragments did not add up to something cohesive or memorable here. It’s very obvious to me why the Harry Potter series, flawed though it is, resonated with people, and why I can still take an online quiz telling me that I'm a Ravenclaw or a Slytherin and not one telling me I'm a Julian or a Noah (regrettably, I am a Noah). I'm not sure I made the right decision on which story to retain in my memory. I'm also not sure I made the wrong one.
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. The next installment will cover the 1944 medalist, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes.