2013: THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN by Katherine Applegate
I am Ivan. I am a gorilla. It's not as easy as it looks.
[a note on content: this piece and the novel contain discussions of animal abuse]
Katherine Applegate has had a remarkable and prolific writing career across genres. She has created seven long-term chapter book series, written standalone novels and picture books, partnered with Disney on book tie-ins to The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and even cranked out a few Harlequin romance novels under a pseudonym, "crank out" being the only appropriate verb for writing a Harlequin novel. But her true legacy is the Animorphs series that she created under the name "K.A. Applegate"; as anyone who did not go to boy-girl parties in junior high can tell you, Animorphs is a masterpiece of twentieth-century science fiction. You may remember these books from their distinctive covers showing teen children timelapse-transforming into animals; those books were about ordinary teens JUST LIKE YOU who were granted the power to morph into animals in order to repel an alien invasion. It was an extremely cool sci-fi concept, Applegate’s ability to write about fighting and thinking inside an animal’s body was very compelling, the series had a good sense of humor and a great sense of pacing and action, and the characters were all spins on tween archetypes - Jake was the reluctant leader, Marco was the class clown, Rachel was the pretty popular girl, Tobias was the weirdo outcast, Cassie was the hippie - that readers had fun following around and seeing how they responded to these high-stakes situations.
Except the Animorphs novels were, pretty unambiguously, not about turning into a tiger and kicking butt, but really about the morality of war. When the Animorphs banded together to fight the Yeerk invasion, there were human casualties as well. And these kids agonized over the decisions they had to make and the lives they had to risk, especially when those lives weren’t their own, especially when the path to victory could mean endangering the lives of the people close to them.
These were heavy books, and no part of it was heavier than the final book in the series: the war does kind of end, and the humans do kind of win, but the main characters all end up gutted and devastated. One of the principal characters dies in the final battle. Another is accused of war crimes during a trial at the Hague. The will they/won’t they romances fall apart in peacetime. The teens go back to their lives but are ultimately more isolated and miserable than they ever were before the war started. And in the final scene, with another invader on the horizon, they throw themselves into one last battle because it’s the only thing they know how to do and the only thing they’re any good at. It’s a miserable ending, and a lot of the fans were upset. And Applegate responded with this, and I'm including a lot of it because it's pretty stunning:
“...Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.
That’s what happens, so that’s what I wrote…Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating. There’s very little chanting of ‘we’re number one’ among people who’ve personally experienced war…
I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.
So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out?...You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.
If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn’t have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.”
Think about this in the context of culture today, and especially fan culture today, in a world where authors and creators work hard to cultivate positive relationships with their fans by giving them everything they want, in a world where Disney literally rewrote a script for their highest-budget movie because a bunch of loud online nerds didn’t like one of the Star Wars films, in a world where over a million people signed a petition asking HBO to just re-do the entire final season of Game of Thrones “with competent writers", in a world where J.K. Rowling feels a need to build out every single stupid detail of her Harry Potter world 15 years after the novels ended, including how wizards pooped before they figured out plumbing, which in fairness to Rowling is the least appalling thing she has ever said about bathrooms.
Instead of all of that, Katherine Applegate tells her fans “You're reading a story about war. This is what war is. I’m done writing the story, and it was a damn good story. It was supposed to make you angry because you need to go change the world.” In the hands of any other author writing about a boy who can transform into a red-tailed hawk, “I was actually trying to make you angry” would be a laughable excuse for a bad book. But Applegate is just that good. She can write a page-turner story, make you care about the characters, make you struggle along with them as they weigh their options, and make you furious at the rotten world that gave them those options to begin with. Also, Animorphs ended in May 2001, right before our country found itself in a situation where more people should have listened to the advice Applegate had about decisions that “end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.” If you want a story about war, expect that it's going to make you mad.
And, as Applegate would show us twelve years later, if you want a story about a gorilla who lives in a strip mall…well, think about how he must have ended up there. Expect that it's going to make you mad.
Ivan, our title character and narrator in 2013 medalist The One And Only Ivan, is a gorilla who has lived in a concrete cell at the rinkydink Exit 8 Big Top shopping mall for the past 27 years. He's part of a very depressing "circus act" that the mall puts on three times a day to drum up foot traffic, and his best friends are Stella, a maternal elephant, and Bob, a cynical stray dog who sleeps in the mall. They live without veterinary care, or any real sort of mental stimulation - Ivan occasionally colors, and the mall sells his artwork at twenty bucks a pop - or the company of any other animals like them. And Mack, the human who runs the circus act, shoves them out of their cages every day to trudge in a circle for the shoppers, and eventually brings in a new baby elephant, Ruby, to punch up the show.
Mack, as Applegate writes him, is not directly evil. He's not out to torture and kill his animals, his aim is not to cause suffering. But he's desperate to bring business to the mall, exhausted from trying to make ends meet, too shortsighted to make the right decisions, and concerned first and foremost with taking care of himself. Unfortunately, as Applegate has taught me, not-evil people like this can still cause a great deal of suffering in the world, and Mack causes a great deal of suffering in this book.
And the animals do suffer, and it is hard to read at times. Stella can only take two steps inside her cage. Bob is a stray because he was thrown out of a moving car as a puppy. Ruby used to be part of a circus act where she had all four of her legs chained to the floor for 23 hours a day, and is threatened with violence as she learns her new routine at the mall. Somehow, Ivan's own boredom and loneliness feels worse than all of that, as this mighty silverback is reduced to counting the days and thinking "Somehow, I didn’t realize I’d be here quite so long. Now I drink Pepsi, eat old apples, watch reruns on TV."
It gets worse. Stella dies a little before the halfway point of the book, of an infected wound on her foot for which Mack wouldn't call in a vet. Before she dies, she makes Ivan swear to her that he will help baby Ruby get out of that mall. And this lonely gorilla, trying to be stoic in this miserable mall cell, gives Stella his word as a silverback, and we get to see what The One And Only Ivan is really made of. He doesn't know much about zoos, but Stella once told him:
"A good zoo is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don’t hurt…A good zoo is how humans make amends.”
So Ivan has to find a way to get Ruby out of that mall and into a zoo. It is a very unusual story, and, like writing books about kids who can transform into wild animals to fight aliens, it's a very strange choice for Applegate to make up a story about a strip mall gorilla to get her readers mad about how people can treat animals.
But as it turns out, Applegate didn't make the gorilla up. As she's said before, that's what happened, so that's what she wrote.
Ivan was a real gorilla; he lived in a mall in Tacoma, and similar to the fictional Ivan, he was alone in a concrete cell for 27 years straight. For years, Ivan's treatment was the subject of protests and boycotts organized by animal rights activists, but what finally tipped everything was a Glenn Close-narrated 1992 National Geographic documentary titled The Urban Gorilla, which happens to be available in full on YouTube on a channel called “Rando Retro Video” (the segment on Ivan begins around the 33-minute mark).
Ivan's grim accommodations, his subdued personality, the creativity he shows with his fingerpainting, and the voice-over by an anthropologist trying to raise money for an outdoor enclosure and desperately looking for "anything that will improve him", all ignited widespread outrage and media attention, including in the New York Times and People. By 1994, Ivan had been released from the shopping center, and lived out the rest of his days at the Zoo Atlanta, where his re-socialization with other gorillas was very slow, but noticeable.
So when an early scene in Applegate's novel features a kid crying at Ivan's enclosure because "he must be the loneliest gorilla in the world," or when Stella dies because a mall carnie works her to death, it seems heavy-handed. It's not, though. Ivan was a real gorilla, and he really was the loneliest gorilla in the world. People really did this to animals. If it makes you angry to read about it, that's because you should be angry. To paraphrase Applegate's earlier statement on the Animorphs series, if you’re mad at her because you wanted to take away something else from the book, too bad.
But people got angry about Ivan in real life, too, and because they got angry, one small thing in this world got fixed. Applegate wants you angry for a reason.
If you want your readers to be angry, there's a way to do it well and there's a way to just write a terrible book that nobody cares about. The One And Only Ivan is masterfully paced; you don't see the first circus show until a third of the way in, and you don't get the backstory on Ivan's childhood until almost the halfway point, after he makes his promise to Stella and we get to learn who the "mighty silverback" was and is. The chapters are short, there are a lot of them, and time passes between each of them, contributing to your sense of the time and drudgery dragging on at the mall before Applegate picks up the action, and picks you and Ivan up from the drudgery as a result.
Applegate, who wrote for years about teens inhabiting the bodies of animals and sharing their instincts, can also show off in this novel how good she is at writing voice - that is, writing a book that convincingly sounds narrated by a great ape. I don't read a lot of novels narrated by great apes (although, strangely, I have read more than one), but this one does feel very authentic. For one thing, Ivan's narration is, very deliberately, concise. As he states early on in the novel, "Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot," and "Humans speak too much. They chatter like chimps, crowding the world with their noise even when they have nothing to say." Some chapters are only a sentence or two long, and they aren't long sentences. Even though the novel is over 300 pages long - on the high end of Newbery medalist page counts - you can fly through it pretty quickly.
The other tactic that makes the narration work is that Ivan begins the novel very clearly not angry about what's happening to him. He has the sense that maybe he should be, but as he puts it:
"I am never angry. Anger is precious. A silverback uses anger to maintain order and warn his troop of danger. When my father beat his chest, it was to say, Beware, listen, I am in charge. I am angry to protect you, because that is what I was born to do. Here in my domain, there is no one to protect."
You see Ivan suffer, and you see Stella and Ruby suffer with him, but you, the reader, have to be the one who gets angry, because nobody else is going to. Applegate isn't just showing you misery for misery's sake, and she doesn't want to make you angry because she's a sadist. She wants to make you angry on behalf of someone else, the kind of angry that might make you act, the kind of angry that you will use to protect someone someday, the kind of angry she went after with Animorphs to make her young readers think seriously about war.
And it makes it that much more rewarding when the animals finally, finally start to get angry themselves. Ruby takes a swing at Mack with her trunk after he threatens her, and Ivan calls it "the most beautiful mad I have ever heard." As the novel progresses and things get worse at the mall, Ivan starts to come to a boil, as he reflects:
"I am, I suppose, a peaceful sort. Mostly I watch the world go by and think about naps and bananas and yogurt raisins. But inside me, hidden, is another Ivan. He could tear a grown man’s limbs off his body."
In one of the climactic moments of the novel, Ivan finally figures out how he's going to communicate the dire situation at the mall. And in order to do it, in order to save Ruby and get her somewhere safe, he has to get angry and he has to show that anger to the humans around him. But by that point in the novel, he's got plenty of anger ready to go. "I’m angry, at last. I have someone to protect."
Applegate is still writing books like this. In 2017, she published another experiment in voice with Wishtree, a middle grade novel narrated by a 216-year-old tree named Red who has seen some things in the past few centuries in her suburban backyard. In 2017, Red's family are recently resettled Somali refugees, and before long Red finds herself with the word "LEAVE" carved into her trunk after a neighbor kid decides to be a bigot, and the rest of the neighborhood has to figure out how to react.
If you wanted the book narrated by a tree to be about something else, too bad. That tree shelters a refugee, and Applegate's got news for you about refugees in today's world: you're not going to like what you see, and you should expect that this story will make you angry. That tree isn't going to get angry, it's a tree. Somebody like you has to get angry, though, or nothing is going to change.
The One And Only Ivan and Wishtree do each end on a hopeful note. But on the way there you're going to see a lot of suffering and injustice, and it's going to make you angry. Applegate never wants to stop making you angry. But that's because she treats her readers like adults, adults who should get angry, adults whose anger might just spur them to protect someone, to do something to build a more just world. That is the most beautiful mad she's ever heard.
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 1989 medalist, Joyful Noise: Poems For Two Voices by Paul Fleischman. Also here are some links to download every single Animorphs ebook for free.