2003: CRISPIN: THE CROSS OF LEAD by Avi
The day after my mother died, the priest and I wrapped her body in a gray shroud and carried her to the village church.
Guys you're not going to believe this but this Newbery medalist happens to be a historical fiction novel set in Medieval Europe! To be fair, it's actually a pretty fun novel, the action keeps moving and the characters are great, and this is largely because it's a novel by Avi and Avi is great. Avi, born Edward Irving Wortis, is the octogenarian children's novelist who has written roughly 400,000 books, including several favorites from my childhood. 2003 medalist Crispin: The Cross Of Lead was his fiftieth novel and his first to win the Newbery. It's good, and I enjoyed reading it, but I can't write another essay right now about historical fiction set in medieval Europe. So it's time to revisit one of Avi's earlier novels, itself a finalist for the Newbery, that absolutely rules.
Avi has said on his blog that after he published 1991's Nothing But The Truth, “time and time again, different teachers would take me aside and ask: “Did you write Nothing but the Truth because someone told you what had happened in my school?”” They are, I have to assume, still asking him that. When I read Nothing But The Truth as a child, I thought “hey that’s pretty good”. That I still remembered it years later is a testament to its memorable structure and plot. And then, when I reread it in 2024, I landed on the conclusion that Nothing But The Truth is merely one of the greatest and most important American children’s novels of all time, one that belongs on the same shelf with Holes and A Wrinkle In Time and the like, and actually everybody needs to read the book right now please. It is, in its unbelievably dark denouement and major takeaway, unlike any other novel I have read for this project, and it is the perfect novel for the world of 2024. Get it from your library and read it now, before I tell you everything that happens in it. Here we go.
Nothing But The Truth is subtitled “A Documentary Novel”; even though everything that happens in the book is made up, the story is told entirely through “primary documents”: phone call transcripts, diary entries, and intraoffice memos. The idea, as Avi has said, was to create something similar to a crime scene or the discovery phase of a criminal case. You get incomplete pictures and unreliable characters having conversations with other unreliable characters, and it’s up to you as a reader to piece together what “really” happened. Multiple times throughout the novel, characters say “okay, now it’s time for people to hear the truth” or something similar, and every single time it precedes a blatantly incomplete or inaccurate or ignorant picture of what actually happened.
So is this a murder? A caper? A conspiracy? No, and that’s where the true brilliance of Nothing But The Truth is revealed: the events we are investigating are, from the very beginning, nothing more than an endless flat circle of human stupidity.
Here's what actually happens in the novel: Philip Malloy is a ninth grade jackass who wants to try out for his school's track team. He doesn’t apply himself in his English class because he thinks Jack London is boring, and this frustrates his old-school English teacher, Ms. Narwin. Narwin gives Philip a D for the quarter, which leaves Philip ineligible to try out for track. Philip is pissed, blames Narwin for everything, and starts being more of a dick in her English class and homeroom. During homeroom, the school plays a tape of “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the PA and asks students to stand at “respectful, silent attention”. Philip hums along with the track to annoy Narwin, Narwin asks him to stop repeatedly, and eventually she has to send him to the assistant principal’s office. When Philip refuses to apologize for being disruptive, he’s suspended for a day and a half, and Philip’s parents are pissed at him until Philip says that he was “suspended for singing the national anthem”. Philip’s dad, already frustrated because he’s getting regularly chewed out by his boss, decides to become outraged that Philip’s school is suspending people for being patriotic, and tells the neighbor, who is running for one of the open seats on the school board. The neighbor, as he hears this, happens to be talking to the education reporter for the local paper. That reporter hears Philip’s side of the story, runs with it, the story runs in the local paper and the neighbor makes it a centerpiece of his local campaign. The story gets picked up by the AP, who puts it on the national wire. And then it gets picked up by conservative talk radio. And everything, everything, everything turns to shit.
You can see what all of this is, obviously. It's an account of manufactured outrage and media circuses and misunderstandings for stupid reasons and petty local political fights. The way these things go has not really changed at all from 1991 to 2024, and if you read Nothing But The Truth today, it will feel like something that could very obviously happen today. Like, Twitter wasn't around I guess, but otherwise every beat of this story feels extremely real. What feels the most real of all, of course, is how it all ends, because where do you think a story like this ends? I mean, as an outside observer, what usually happens with me is that I lose interest in the story and move on to the next thing. But that's not what happens to the people who are in the story.
Throughout the entirety of Nothing But The Truth, we see increasingly panicked memos from the school superintendent about the upcoming referendum for the budget. The last budget got voted down, and the new budget in front of the voters is cutting everything down to the bone; any further cuts will leave the district, as the superintendent puts it, “scooping marrow”. Well, the budget gets voted down again in the final pages of the novel, so people are going to start losing their jobs as the conservative ideologue neighbor takes his new seat on the school board. And Ms. Narwin walks away from her job, too. She's been teaching for over two decades, she consistently turns out the highest standardized test scores in the district, all of her students except Philip love her, and she's asked to take the rest of the semester on sabbatical until everything blows over. Heartbroken, she just decides to retire early and move to Florida. She even got with a reporter and tried to get her side of the story out there, but the paper ended up not running the story because they had to cover a military crisis in South America.
As for Philip? The guy who keeps getting adoring fan mail from American Legion chapters all over the country? Well it turns out bringing a media circus to your school where TV cameras are setting up on the lawn every day, and getting a beloved veteran teacher to leave forever, does not make you very popular. Philip's crush, who really liked Ms. Narwin, tells him to pound sand. The track coach tells Philip to pound sand because he doesn't seem like a team player anymore. None of Philip's friends will talk to him anymore. Philip buckles under the stress and refuses to go back in to school. His mom enrolls him in a private school, which his dad objects to because the tuition is basically going to wipe out Phil's college fund. Phil starts attending the new private school, which doesn't have a track team due to lack of interest, so Phil's hope of running track in college are squashed. And on his first day in his new homeroom, when the national anthem starts playing, he bursts into tears. And that's the end. Yeah, buddy: it's dark in here.
Avi's novel doesn't strike me as a critique of the media landscape or overblown patriotism or kids that do not sufficiently appreciate the writing of Jack London. Because the real lesson that I take away from Nothing But The Truth: if it wasn’t about this, it was going to be about something else. That becomes very clear near the end of the novel, when a beaten-down Ms. Narwin sits down with a newspaper reporter, on forced sabbatical, “surrounded by letters, and telegrams too - from people, perfect strangers who know nothing about me, who hate me”. She says that “I feel like I've been mugged. Assaulted,” although she can't say by whom. And when she is asked point-blank by the reporter what the reason is that all of this happened, she answers with, as it turns out, the truth: “Reason? Mr. Duval, I keep wishing there was a reason. No, no reason at all.” That's the real horror story of Nothing But The Truth. This entire chain of events, which ends with a school district getting its funding gutted and a boy's life being ruined, just happens, for no reason. There's no evil person pulling the strings, there was no long-term plot to impose a new regime on the school district. There was a guy in a bad mood because his teacher assigned the wrong book and another guy in a bad mood because his job happened to suck and they had a bad day and happened to live next to a certain guy who was talking to a certain reporter who had to hit a deadline and file a story and the wire service needed to put something up and there happened to be a budget crunch and an election coming up and and and the things that are shaping people's lives are not really guns or money or arguments, but stupidity and random chance. Ms. Narwin’s side of the story never sees the light of day, not because the bad guys win, but because there's a coup in another hemisphere and the newspaper doesn’t have room to run it. Nobody stops it, because nobody thinks they can stop it, because nobody thinks there's anything that can be stopped. This is how the world works, and in the absence of people being willing to look for what the truth is, even when that truth does not help them win an argument, this is how the world will keep working.
I originally drafted this piece in early February. The day after I drafted it, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether we should disqualify a presidential candidate from running for office because he incited an insurrection resulting in the deaths of several people back in 2021. One of the arguments for keeping him on the ballot was that voters should be able to decide whether his actions should disqualify him from office, and maybe they will decide that this time. But the voters have decided that before, and in response, he got his supporters to break into the Capitol and start shooting, all because the right stupid people watched the right TV and went to the right place at the wrong time. He didn’t like the truth he saw because it didn’t help him win, and so the only option left was to start shooting. The Supreme Court seemed to think that wasn’t a big deal. They also, months later, appeared not to think it was a big deal that he attempted to overturn an election in the first place, and that presidents should generally be able to do whatever they want without regard for the laws.
Nobody stops it, because nobody thinks they can stop it, because nobody thinks there’s anything that can be stopped. Let’s hope things end better for us than they did for Philip Malloy.
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 1940 medalist, Daniel Boone by James Daugherty.