Marah Gubar - Longwood University Gubar ‘‘Whacked-Out Partners’’: The Inversion of Empathy...
Transcript of Marah Gubar - Longwood University Gubar ‘‘Whacked-Out Partners’’: The Inversion of Empathy...
Marah Gubar
‘‘Whacked-Out Partners’’:The Inversion of Empathyin the Joey Pigza Trilogy
This essay traces how Jack Gantos’ Joey Pigza trilogy underminesmany common stereotypes about the disabled, focusing in particu-lar on its rejection of the literary tradition that sets the impairedchild up as a passive object of empathy. Inverting this paradigm,Gantos instead characterizes his protagonist as an empatheticagent in his own right. Joey, who has attention-deficit/hyperactiv-ity disorder, even manages to sympathize with the unsympatheticadults around him, whose insensitive treatment of him compli-cates his life. Readers of the series are thus invited not just toempathize with Joey, but to emulate him, by extending their com-passion to the imperfect adults as well as the impaired child.
KEY WORDS: Joey Pigza; Jack Gantos; empathy; disability; children’s literature.
Children’s texts that feature disabled child protagonists often share
two primary goals: to allow children with impairments to see them-
selves represented in literature, and to persuade other child readers
to empathize with their disabled peers. Jack Gantos’ prize-winningJoey Pigza books certainly allow for these two responses. Narrated
by a boy named Joey who has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(AD/HD), these three novels feature insightful, humorous descrip-
tions of the experience of coping with this condition. Elementary
educators have confirmed that reading about Joey’s ups and downs
helps students to understand AD/HD.1 But to interpret Gantos’ fic-
tion solely in terms of its ability to enable this kind of sympathetic
identification can easily prevent us from noticing his subtle, multi-layered critique of the way in which adults—including educators,
parents, and doctors—treat Joey. The Joey Pigza trilogy does not
simply aim to induce child readers to relate to its troubled child
Marah Gubar is an Assis-tant Professor at theUniversity of Pittsburgh.Her publicationsinclude articles onE. Nesbit, E. B. White,and Lucy Maud Mont-gomery. Her commen-tary on children’sliterature can also beheard on National Pub-lic Radio.
Jack Gantos, Joey Pigza
Swallowed the Key,Joey Pigza Loses Con-
trol, What Would Joey
Do?
Children’s Literature in Education, Vol. 35, No. 3, September 2004 (� 2004)
219
0045-6713/04/0900-0219/0 � 2004 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
protagonist; it also prods adults to confront our habit of making pre-
mature assumptions about disabled children and unwise judgments
about the way we treat them. Gantos inverts the traditional empa-
thetic paradigm in two ways: first, by insisting that readers extendtheir compassion to the imperfect adults as well as the impaired
child; and second, by setting up his child hero not simply as an
object of empathy but as the exemplary practitioner of that delicate
art.
The first book in the series, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (1998),
sets out the terms of Gantos’ critique. The first problematic assump-
tion he assails is the idea that children with behavioral problems arenecessarily unintelligent. Because Joey has problems paying attention
and sitting still, people assume that he is slow-witted. Twice special
education teachers give Joey books that are well below his reading
level, assigning him ‘‘dopey picture book[s…] instead of chapter
books’’ (pp. 38, 111). Joey realizes that people underrate his mental
abilities; when his mother tells him that he should not think of him-
self as stupid, he replies, ‘‘Everyone else does [. . .T]hey call me
Retard [. . .], or Brain-damaged, or Zippy the Pinhead’’ (p. 82). Dis-turbingly, even as Mrs. Pigza urges her son to ignore such slander,
she too makes the mistake of equating good behavior with intelli-
gence. When she praises Joey for getting though a whole day with-
out getting into trouble at school, she ‘‘calls me her genius, her
hypersmart buddy’’ (p. 53). But Joey’s problems at school have noth-
ing to do with his intellect; not only is he a good reader, he is also
‘‘really quick at math’’ (p. 3).
Nevertheless, Joey’s teachers associate his behavioral problems with
a lack of knowledge. Near the start of the novel, Joey’s new teacher
Mrs. Maxy sits him down and lectures him on her rules: ‘‘I had to
stay in my seat, she said. No running, jumping, or kicking. Keep my
hands on top of my desk. I wasn’t allowed to look over my shoul-
der. No touching the person in front of me. No fidgeting and no
drawing on myself’’ (p. 19). Assuming that Joey does not know how
to behave, Mrs. Maxy not only tells him, she also prints these rulesout on a card which she tapes to his desk. Joey himself articulates
the problem with this strategy late in the novel. After experiencing
life in another teacher’s classroom, he notes, ‘‘it really made me feel
good not to have the rules taped to [my desk]. Because I knew the
rules. It wasn’t that I never knew them. It was that I kept forgetting
to stick to them’’ (p. 152). Joey does not have a knowledge prob-
lem; he has a concentration problem, as indicated by his description
of Mrs. Maxy’s lecture. After listing every single one of her rules, asquoted above, Joey adds,
220 Children’s Literature in Education
Problem was, I wasn’t listening. She had on bright red nail polish and I
couldn’t get my eyes off the way her fingers tapped on my desktop and were
leaving tiny half-moon dents in the wood. And the next day I sure didn’t
remember a thing she said, and by lunchtime my meds had worn off again and
I was spinning around in my chair like it was the Mad Hatter’s Teacup ride at
the church carnival. (p. 20)
How is it that Joey can narrate Mrs. Maxy’s long list of rules, given
that he ‘‘wasn’t listening’’ and cannot ‘‘remember a thing she said’’
the next day? Gantos has his hero recount this list in perfect detailin order to stress that although Joey has problems paying attention,
he does not have trouble knowing or understanding the rules. He is
simply easily distracted, unable to keep his mind and body still
enough to recall, apply, and ‘‘stick to’’ the rules (p. 152).
Indeed, Gantos makes quickness Joey’s defining characteristic, a
choice that also helps to undermine the idea that his hero is slow-
witted. Numerous incidents attest to Joey’s physical speediness,2 butmany more reveal that his mind moves at a million miles an hour as
well. In fact, Gantos suggests that Joey has trouble paying attention
not because there is too little going on in his head, but because
there is too much. Thus, Joey explains that he has a hard time con-
centrating when the school nurse questions him about his condition
because his mind starts racing:
I just didn’t like listening [. . .], because some questions take forever to make
sense. Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone
draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your
mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that
also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one
thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others. (pp. 34--35)
If anything, this passage suggests, it is other people who are slow;
Joey’s mind is moving at top speed. Many different aspects of Joey’s
narrative style attest to his mental agility: the brilliance of his choice
of simile here and elsewhere; the wide-ranging nature of his refer-
ences to literature and pop culture (he mentions everyone fromthe Mad Hatter and the Three Musketeers to Charlie Brown, the
Simpsons, and Gilly Hopkins); and the linguistic playfulness he
exhibits when he says things like, ‘‘[O]ur class had a substitute
named Miss Adams, who didn’t know me from Adam’’ (p. 67).
As this line indicates, Joey’s quick-wittedness is also evident in the
jokes and clever retorts that he frequently fires off. The opening
scene of Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key depicts him cutting up inclass, and he often describes how he ‘‘sho[ots] back’’ ripostes that
prompt others to giggle helplessly (p. 58). Such moments work to
undermine another preconception: namely, that disabled children
221Whacked-Out Partners
are unlikely to have a sense of humor (and, by extension, that texts
featuring such characters will not be amusing). Even Joey is guilty of
making this assumption. On his first bus trip to the Special Educa-
tion Center, he meets a kid named Charlie who does not have func-tional arms. Presuming that Charlie will not be a fun companion,
Joey shies away from him, admitting that the other boy’s impairment
gives him ‘‘high-voltage willies’’ (p. 92).
But Charlie proves far less frightening than Joey expects; in fact, his
first act is to reassure Joey by making a joke. After the bus driver
mistakes him for ‘‘the new foster kid,’’ Joey begins to panic, worry-
ing that ‘‘they’re trying to take my mom away from me’’ (p. 90, 92).Charlie replies, ‘‘‘They aren’t going to take your mom away [. . .] I
begged them to take mine and they wouldn’t, so it’s doubtful they’ll
take yours behind your back’’’ (pp. 92--93). To distract Joey, Charlie
introduces him to May and June, dyslexic sisters who kid around as
well. Grinning cheerfully, they inform Joey that they ‘‘‘can write
notes [. . .] to each other in backward writing and people can’t
understand it,’’’ prompting Joey to ask them if they can talk back-
wards as well: ‘‘‘I wish,’ May said. ‘Maybe they’ll teach us at specialed,’ said June, and giggled. ‘That is, after we learn how to read for-
ward writing’’’ (p. 94).
The first time I read this scene, it surprised me, because like Joey, I
was expecting these children to be upsetting rather than entertain-
ing characters. The books I read about disabled children when I was
younger—such as Marguerite de Angeli’s The Door in the Wall
(1949), Jean Little’s Mine for Keeps (1962), and Betsy Byars’ The
Summer of the Swans (1970)—did not feature a great deal of
humor.3 Perhaps for this reason, I was not expecting these children
to crack jokes, or to treat their own condition lightly. But just
because Charlie does not have fully operational arms, it does not fol-
low that he cannot tell a joke. In later scenes, Gantos suggests that
the problem is not simply that people do not expect disabled kids
to be funny; in some sense, they are not allowed to be funny. Joey’s
encounters with Ed Vanness, his special education instructor at theCenter, prove this point.
When the two first meet, Ed makes a joke about his name, telling
Joey that he can call him ‘‘Special Ed.’’ But when Joey responds in
kind, Ed insists, ‘‘‘We have to get serious now’’’ (p. 102). Similarly,
when Joey plasters himself with Band-Aids, an annoyed Ed rebukes
him ‘‘in a very strict voice’’ (p. 116). Later, after Joey has a brain
scan that reveals that his problems are not neurologically severe, heagain sticks Band-Aids all over his stomach, but this time Ed
responds very differently. As Joey observes, ‘‘He was trying not to
222 Children’s Literature in Education
laugh. Last time he was so mad, but now everything was different.
Instead of being sick, I was just being a kid. Now that I was getting
better, people could like me more’’ (pp. 140--141). Although Ed is in
many ways an enabling presence in Joey’s life, his behavior in thiscase sends a disturbing, two-pronged message: one, that only ‘‘nor-
mal’’ children can be funny; and two, that the less disabled you are,
the more likable you are.
Besides challenging his readers to let go of the notion that disabled
children are humorless and mentally slow, Gantos also exposes the
way in which adults tend to portray special education as a punish-
ment for failure rather than as a helpful resource. Early in the novel,he highlights the fact that Joey has no preconceptions about the spe-
cial education classroom; ‘‘the special-ed room was new,’’ Joey
notes, ‘‘and I didn’t even know what it was yet’’ (p. 26). By stress-
ing his hero’s unfamiliarity with this space, Gantos reminds us that it
is up to the teachers to shape Joey’s perception of special education.
Unfortunately, when Mrs. Maxy first tells Joey about the possibility
that he might need to attend such classes, she formulates this news
as a threat, warning Joey that ‘‘‘[I]f you can’t live by the class rulesthen we’ll have to send you down to the special-ed class for extra
help’’’ (p. 25). Similarly, when the principal, Mrs. Jarzab, informs
Joey’s mother of her decision that Joey should attend the Center for
a few weeks, she says, ‘‘‘I warned you […] that if we didn’t have
the resources to help Joey here, [. . .] we would have to consider
intensive counseling at the special-ed center downtown’’’ (p. 79).
The threatening tone of both of these comments suggests that suchmeasures constitute a punishment, a message that is reinforced by
the school’s decision to locate their special education room in the
basement. Joey quickly begins referring to it as ‘‘Mrs. Howard’s dun-
geon,’’ and when he returns to his regular class after his first visit
there, he tries desperately to sit still ‘‘because if I slipped and lost
concentration and didn’t pay attention to my highlighted tasks list
Mrs. Maxy might have no other choice but to give up on me for
good and send me full-time down to special ed’’ (pp. 40, 45). Byechoing the ‘‘if…then’’ constructions that his teachers use, Joey
reveals that he has absorbed the message that special education is
not an enabling resource, but a punitive last resort. Getting sent
there feels like being tossed out like the trash, in part because Joey
associates the basement with waste removal; ‘‘Are we going to visit
the janitor?’’ he asks, as Mrs. Jarzab leads him down to Mrs.
Howard’s room for the first time (p. 35). This choice of location also
sends the message that disabled children are an embarrassment thatmust be hidden from sight. During this visit, Joey observes that
although he has seen disabled students arriving on their special bus,
223Whacked-Out Partners
‘‘I always wondered where they went once they arrived’’ (p. 36).
The educators’ decision to render these students invisible once they
enter the school suggests that there is something shameful about
having a disability.
The adults’ habit of characterizing Joey’s behavioral problems in
moral terms has the same effect. Because he cannot sit still, his
grandmother gets mad at him ‘‘for not being good’’ and warns him
that his mother will not ‘‘come home to a bad boy’’ (pp. 123--124).
In addition, Joey’s mom reassures him that his stint at the Center
will be temporary by saying, ‘‘‘Soon they’ll see what a good guy you
are and send you back’’’ (p. 82). Here she suggests that Joey’s char-
acter is in question, rather than his behavior. Consciously or not,
Joey notices that adults portray his disability as a moral failing and
resists this tendency. For example, after accidentally harming a fel-
low classmate, he insists, ‘‘‘I’m a good kid. I just got dud meds’’’
and ‘‘‘It was an accident [. . .]. I’m not a bad kid’’’ (pp. 76, 85). He
tries to shift the focus from his character to his behavior by making
comments like, ‘‘‘I only broke a few rules [. . .]. There’s nothing
wrong with me but that’’’ (p. 37).
Given that the grown-ups around him routinely portray disability as
a character flaw and special education as a punishment, it is no won-
der that Joey worries that ‘‘the special-ed school [i]s going to be like
a prison for bad kids’’ (p. 99). To underline this point, Gantos con-
trasts the treatment of the special education students with that of
the children enrolled in the ‘‘gifted and talented’’ program. Soon
after Joey has begun attending Mrs. Howard’s class, he hears it‘‘announced over the loudspeaker’’ that ‘‘all the students in the
gifted and talented program were to be released to meet in the audi-
torium for a special presentation’’ (p. 67). As the public nature of
this announcement suggests, these students are singled out in posi-
tive, productive way, as opposed to being marginalized in a punitive
way. Unlike the basement, the auditorium is a high prestige space.
Going there means being ‘‘released’’ rather than confined, rewarded
rather than punished for your difference.
Just as the adults around Joey conflate disability with moral inferior-
ity, they also assume that intellectual ability and goodness go hand
in hand. Addressing the convocation of gifted students, a guest
speaker named Mrs. Cole declares, ‘‘‘Special people have to do spe-
cial things for others less fortunate [. . .]. This is one of the great
duties for people of exceptional character’’’ (p. 68). But there is no
necessary link between brains and virtue; just because these kids aresmart, it does not follow that they have ‘‘exceptional character[s]’’
too. Hiding behind the auditorium curtain, Joey eavesdrops on Mrs.
224 Children’s Literature in Education
Cole’s speech, and recognizes—as she does not—that her definition
of ‘‘special’’ could apply to him:
In a roundabout way she was talking to me. I knew I’d never be part of the
gifted and talented kids. That much was true. But I was one of the special peo-
ple. My mom said I was special, the nurse said I was special, and I was also in
special ed. So I really listened to everything she had to say, and I liked what I
heard, that because we were the special kids we had to make sure we put our
energy and talent to work for the benefit of the whole world. (pp. 68--69)
Because Mrs. Cole’s message about what it means to be special is
positive and enabling, Joey can ‘‘really liste[n]’’ to what she says; for
once, he has no trouble at all staying focused. In contrast, when
Mrs. Maxy warns him that one day his antics will cause him to harm
not only himself but other students as well, Joey cannot bring him-
self to attend: ‘‘I don’t know why I couldn’t listen to her. She talkedsome more about the dangers of hurting people, but it was as if all
her words were crowded up together in a long line of letters and
sounds that just didn’t make sense. It was more like listening to cir-
cus music than to talk’’ (p. 25). As his reference to the circus sug-
gests, Joey has trouble listening to this speech because it categorizes
him as dangerously ‘‘other’’ rather than special in any kind of posi-
tive way. As he says elsewhere, he hates being treated ‘‘as if I was
some kind of circus freak’’ (p. 38).
Such treatment invariably leads him to act up more, as indicated by
his actions in the scene in which he makes this remark. Joey says
that he feels like a circus freak after discovering that his chair in the
special education room is bolted to the floor. Upset, he starts
‘‘rock[ing] even harder’’ and ‘‘kick[ing] at the legs’’ (p. 38). Then,
when the adults in the room start staring as him as if he is ‘‘some
hopeless kid,’’ it makes him ‘‘so mad [. . .] that I kicked away at thechair legs until my heels were so sore they were bruised and it hurt
to kick’’ (p. 39). This scene demonstrates that being treated as an
‘‘Other’’—as a freakish, dangerous, and/or sick person—exacerbates
Joey’s behavior problems. He is painfully aware that people often
‘‘loo[k] at me as if they were at the zoo and I was something in a
cage’’ (p. 66).
As this line indicates, Gantos also aims to expose the damaging habitpeople have of associating disabled children with animals. Baskin
and Harris note that children’s books published between 1940 and
1975 often suggest ‘‘that handicapped persons are uniquely in har-
mony with the natural world, unfeared by and able to communicate
with wild creatures’’ (p. 85). It is astonishing how many contempo-
rary children’s stories about kids with AD/HD continue to perpetu-
ate this idea. For example, the hero of Jeanne Gehret’s Eagle Eyes: A
Barbara H. Baskin andKaren H. Harris, Notes
From a Different
Drummer: A Guide to
Juvenile Fiction Por-
traying the Disabled
225Whacked-Out Partners
Child’s Guide to Paying Attention (1991) begins his story by
announcing, ‘‘When my family goes to Birdsong Trail, I spot more
wildlife than anybody else’’ (p. 1). His uncanny ability to sense the
presence of chickadees arises from his own resemblance to a bird:‘‘Dad explained that I have eagle eyes: I notice everything’’ (p. 14).
Susan Shreve’s Trout and Me (2002) likewise implies that its dis-
abled child heroes love animals because they are like animals. The
climax of this story occurs when Trout and Ben, two fifth-graders
with attention deficit disorder, run away to the Bronx Zoo. Describ-
ing this outing, Ben says,
The monkeys I love, especially the spider monkey with his tiny fingers and
toes, eating and spitting, throwing himself against the glass cage, turning
upside down. […] From time to time, I’d throw my arm over Trout’s shoulder
or he’d push into me, like my dog when she was a puppy and tripped me
every time I tried to get up from the couch. (p. 98)
Just as the monkeys ‘‘thro[w]’’ themselves around their cage, the
narrator ‘‘throw[s]’’ his arm over his companion’s shoulders. Mean-
while, Trout nudges at him like a dog, even as his nickname links
him to a fish. Scenes like this one are problematic not only because
they perpetrate the stereotype that all disabled children enjoy inter-
acting with animals, but also because this particular kind of pigeon-
holing implies that such children are—as the monkey referencesuggests—less than fully evolved.4
It is no wonder that when the school nurse asks Joey a series of
questions to determine if he has AD/HD, she ends up by inquiring,
‘‘Do you like animals?’’ (p. 35). Going by the literature, adoring ani-
mals is a reliable symptom of this disorder! And Joey, at first, seems
to fit right in: ‘‘I love animals,’’ he responds, adding that his greatest
desire is to have a dog (p. 35). The way he expresses this longingclearly reveals the extent of his identification: ‘‘I had always wanted
a dog. A little dog that looked just like me. A Joey dog. A nice,
springy dog. A good dog’’ (p. 88). More specifically, he wants a Chi-
huahua, because he knows that these dogs are as nervous and hyper-
active as he is. When he finally gets his own dog, Pablo, Joey insists
that his new pet ‘‘[i]s just like me. Messed up but lovable’’ (p. 146).
As might be expected, however, Gantos is extremely suspicious ofthe idea that disabled children share an innate connection to ani-
mals. Rather than perpetuate this stereotype, he subverts it by sug-
gesting that kids like Joey empathize with animals not because of
their inherent simplicity and closeness to nature, but rather because
people treat them like animals. In the very first scene of Joey Pigza
Swallowed the Key, Mrs. Maxy expels Joey from her classroom as if
Jeanne Gehret, Eagle
Eyes
Susan Shreve, Trout
and Me
226 Children’s Literature in Education
he were a rowdy dog, ‘‘jerk[ing] her thumb toward the door’’ and
ordering him ‘‘Out’’ (p. 4). Having nothing else to do in the hallway,
Joey begins to act like an animal; first, he entertains himself by play-
ing with a little ball, then he starts to ‘‘snort and grunt’’ and spinaround like the Tasmanian Devil (p. 5). Mrs. Jarzab also treats Joey
like an unruly pet when she takes him down to the special educa-
tion classroom for the first time. ‘‘Patt[ing]’’ his head, she tells him
that he needs to learn how to sit still and obey: ‘‘‘Joey,’ she said, ‘I
want you to listen to Mrs. Howard and do everything she tells you
to do. We’re going to give you a little extra help with sitting still’’
(pp. 35, 37). Immediately afterwards, Joey observes, ‘‘I felt like some
kind of bad dog that had pooped all over the carpet, eaten the slip-pers, and attacked the mailman, and was now being sent to obedi-
ence school’’ (p. 37).
By treating Joey like a disorderly dog, these teachers inflict on him a
lighter version of the kind of abuse he gets from one of his peers
and his grandmother. In the sole account he gives of being bullied
by another child, Joey describes how ‘‘[a] kid named Ford held me
down and tied a leash around my neck. ‘Roll over,’ he hollered, andI did. ‘Play dead,’ he ordered. That scared me and I jerked my head
out of leash, which ripped one of my nose holes so it bled’’ (p. 31).
Ford’s cruelty foreshadows the revelation, late in the novel, of the
type of emotional abuse Grandma Pigza inflicts on her grandson.
Joey recounts how she used to taunt him about his inability to sit
still by chortling, ‘‘You’re like a little puppy’’ and ordering him to
do ‘‘puppy tricks’’:
‘‘Roll over,’’ she’d command, and I’d get on the floor and roll [. . .]. ‘‘Sit up!’’
she’d shout, and clap her hands, and I would, with my little arms up in front
of my face and my wrists curled down like paws. ‘‘Bark,’’ she’d say, and if I
didn’t she’d get the flyswatter and swat me across the bottom until I sounded
like a pet store full of dogs. (pp. 122--123)
By having the most cruelly abusive people in the novel treat Joey
like a dog, Gantos suggests that Joey’s identification with animals is
not an inborn spiritual connection, but rather a learned sense of fel-
low feeling for a similarly subjugated group of beings.
Given the thrust of my argument thus far, it might seem safe to
assume that Gantos demonizes adults, offering a scathing critique ofhow they treat Joey. But in fact, he refuses to let us blame Joey’s
problems on any one person, and insists that we empathize not just
with Joey, but with all of the adults around him, including his grand-
mother. In doing so, Gantos inverts the traditional empathetic para-
digm, in which the disabled child protagonist serves as the primary
subject of sympathetic identification. That is to say, such characters
227Whacked-Out Partners
receive empathy, often in a double sense. First, some admirable per-
son—an understanding parent, teacher, doctor, sibling or peer—
shows compassion for them. Then, following the lead of this good
friend or caregiver, readers are expected to sympathize with the dis-abled child character as well. The Joey Pigza trilogy revises this par-
adigm: there is no ideal friend or caregiver, and Joey functions not
as the primary subject of empathy, but rather as the ideal empa-
thetic agent. As readers, we are thus invited not to feel sorry for the
disabled child, but rather to emulate him.
Joey’s status as an exemplar of empathy is revealed early on, in a
moving scene from Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key that takes placein the special education classroom. During a birthday party for a
severely disabled student named Harold, Joey, Mrs. Howard, and the
mothers of some of the students all stand in a circle watching as
Harold, who is in a neck brace, struggles to blow out the candle on
his birthday cupcake. But as Joey explains, ‘‘he had no wind in him
[…H]e just jerked his head back and forth and kept spitting little
bubbles’’ (p. 46). Agonizing minutes go by, until finally Joey takes
action:
I looked into his face as hard as I could and it was like I heard him screaming
inside, ‘‘Come on! Don’t just stand there. Do something!’’ I looked around at
the adults and they were all leaning forward, but were frozen as if they didn’t
know what to do next. But I did, which meant it was up to me. Everyone
wanted the candle blown out so I stepped forward, took a big breath, [and did
it]. (p. 46)
The adults are horrified by this action; gasping, they look at Joey ‘‘as
if I had just stabbed Harold’’ (p. 46). But Joey turns out to be right
when he says insists that ‘‘I had done [Harold] a favor […] and I
could tell he was happy’’ (pp. 46--47). At the end of the novel,Harold’s mother praises Joey for his ‘‘good heart’’ and tells him that
ever since the party, her son has been looking for him (p. 153). She
also thrills him by telling him that his improvement gives her hope
for Harold, prompting Joey to marvel, ‘‘it was amazing to me that
she said what she did because I never thought someone would ever
point to me and say I gave them hope that someday their kid would
be like me’’ (p. 153). Joey’s shock at the notion that anyone would
consider him a role model helps explain why Gantos chooses to sethim up as an exemplar of empathy. He wants his readers—including
kids like Joey—to recognize that even when a child has some behav-
ioral problems, his behavior in other regards might nevertheless pro-
vide a model that others would do well to follow.
This scene is exceptional in that a disabled child serves as the subject
of Joey’s empathy. Far more often, he shows compassion for the
228 Children’s Literature in Education
unsympathetic adults around him and prods readers to follow his
lead. For example, Joey refuses to let us view his grandmother as a
villain, despite her cruel treatment of him. In the opening pages of
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, he twice insists that it is ‘‘unfair’’ toblame her harshly because she is coping with the same problem he
is: both of them were ‘‘born wired’’ (pp. 9--10). Mrs. Pigza confirms
that Joey’s grandma is hyperactive too, noting that the only ‘‘differ-
ence is she’s more active in the mouth, and you are more active in
the feet’’ (p. 14). By linking Joey’s trouble sitting still with his grand-
ma’s trouble controlling what she says, Gantos prods us to interpret
Joey’s description of Grandma Pigza’s cruel treatment of him not as a
case of an evil person abusing an innocent victim, but rather as onein which two human beings struggle with a shared problem that they
cannot control. As Joey puts it, ‘‘People who blame Grandma for my
behavior are unfair to think that she was really the crazy one and I
was innocent. It was more that we were whacked-out partners’’ (p.
10). Joey realizes that the two of them exacerbate each other’s unruly
tendencies: ‘‘We zipped around the house and slapped at each other
like one of those World Wrestling tag teams’’ (p. 10).
Empathy involves identifying with and understanding the thoughts
and feelings of others, an ability Joey reveals when he conceives of his
grandma as a ‘‘partner’’ and forgives her for mistreating him ‘‘because
I was the same as her at times when I lost it’’ (p. 14). Unlike the adults
around him, he realizes that she needs help just as he does: ‘‘She
should have been on meds too. [. . .] But because she was a grandma,
people didn’t think she was sick. They just called her a batty old bird.
But she was sick like me, only old, so her sickness was different’’(p. 15). Nevertheless, the structure of Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
makes it extremely difficult for readers to follow Joey’s lead and sym-
pathize with Grandma Pigza. After reading the wrenching scene near
the end of the novel in which Joey reveals how she tormented him
and treated him like a dog while his mother was away, it is easy to for-
get or disregard his opening statements in her defense. For Joey, the
reality of the trauma she inflicted on him is an old story that he cannot
stop telling: ‘‘it was the kind of story that doesn’t go away after thefirst time you tell it so you have to tell it over and over’’ (p. 122). But
for the reader, it is a new and painful revelation; by suddenly disclos-
ing the degree of Grandma Pigza’s cruelty, Gantos shocks us into real-
izing that she bears more blame for Joey’s problems that we might
have imagined. The effect of this discovery is to set Grandma Pigza up
as the most culpable adult in the novel, a figure we are more likely to
vilify than identify with and understand.
Still, Joey continues to empathize with her, and as the series pro-
gresses Gantos makes it increasingly clear that readers should strive
229Whacked-Out Partners
to follow his example. Joey meets up with Grandma Pigza again
when he goes to stay with her and his father in the second novel,
Joey Pigza Loses Control (2000). Before he arrives, Joey worries that
his grandmother will try to hurt him again; afterwards, he acknowl-edges that she still has a ‘‘mean and scary’’ streak (p. 36). Neverthe-
less, when he sees how ill she is with emphysema, and how rudely
his father treats her, he declares that ‘‘I […] couldn’t feel anything
else about her except for how sorry I felt that she was in such bad
shape’’ (p. 74). Although she has trouble moving around with her
oxygen tank, Grandma Pigza takes Joey on outings because she
knows he needs to burn off excess energy by running around. On
one such occasion, Joey notes, ‘‘It was just the kind of activity Momwas hoping to provide for me. And I wished she was here to see
that not everything with Grandma was awful’’ (p. 45). Prompted by
this line, readers may well begin to notice the small ways in which
Grandma Pigza tries to protect Joey from his father, a former alco-
holic who has begun drinking again. Besides telling Carter Pigza that
‘‘‘Your drinkin’ again’s not right,’’’ she also steps between him and
Joey when it looks like Mr. Pigza is about to strike his son (p. 98).
Despite these incidents, however, it is still a surprise when Grandma
Pigza emerges as the most nurturing of Joey’s guardians in the final
book of the series, What Would Joey Do? (2002). Throughout the
first two novels, Joey’s mother serves as his mainstay and protector,
but in the final installment she allows herself to be drawn into a ser-
ies of absurd and violent fights with Joey’s dad, including one in
which he repeatedly zooms by her house on his motorcycle until
she sticks a broom handle in his wheel so that he shoots into the airand impales himself on a small tree branch. Neither parent notices
the negative effect that such commotion has on Joey, but Grandma
Pigza does: ‘‘You’re acting like your old self again,’’ she informs
Joey, adding that it makes her ‘‘really mad’’ to see his parents
‘‘‘bringing out the worst in you again. They should be ashamed, but
they’re not because they are too selfish to think of anyone’s needs
other than their own’’’ (p. 86). Grandma Pigza tries hard to keep
Joey from getting caught up in his parents’ fights. During the motor-cycle brawl, for example, she catches him as he starts to run toward
them. Pulling him ‘‘behind her as if she were protecting me from a
fire,’’ she tells him, ‘‘‘Joey, you stay up here on the porch and leave
those two fools alone’’’ (pp. 15--16).
As this incident suggests, Grandma Pigza goes from being the most
abusive to the most protective of Joey’s guardians over the course of
the series. Thus, in her first appearance, she throws away thedetailed reports that Joey’s school sends home in an effort to help
him, calling them junk mail. But in the final book, she takes a job
230 Children’s Literature in Education
‘‘folding junk-mail advertisements and stuffing them into envelopes’’
in order to earn money that she can leave to Joey after her death to
help him ‘‘move on’’ and take care of himself (pp. 9, 38). Deter-
mined not to die until ‘‘‘I see to it that you are headed in the rightdirection,’’’ she gives Joey lots of advice, all of which turns out to
be right (p. 37). In particular, she pesters him to make friends out-
side of his family who can serve as a support network, something
she herself never had. When he protests that he already has Pablo,
she objects to his habit of associating himself so strongly with ani-
mals: ‘‘‘Pablo is a dog [. . .]. What you need is a person friend your
own age’’’ (p. 12). Just as she appreciates his humanity, Joey appre-
ciates hers; after she dies, ‘‘[w]hatever hurtful things she had eversaid or done all vanis[h]’’ from his mind as he remembers how ‘‘she
came back to help me even though I didn’t know I still needed her
help. She knew Mom and Dad were not finished with each other,
and it was up to her to get me out of this crazy house so I could
have a chance to be somebody besides Carter and Fran’s wired-up
kid’’ (pp. 181, 183--184).
Grandma Pigza never develops into an ideal caregiver; she continuesto intimidate Joey with threatening gestures and mean remarks. Still,
her evolution into a genuinely supportive guardian validates the non-
judgmental and forgiving stance Joey takes towards her. By contrast,
Mrs. Pigza’s character develops in a diametrically opposite way over
the course of the series. A kind and comforting presence at first, she
betrays Joey’s trust in the final novel by acting in an irresponsible,
self-involved, and cruel fashion. In the first two books, she literally
acts as Joey’s savior, rescuing him first from his grandma’s abuse andthen from his father’s. Although Gantos makes it clear that she is not
a perfect parent, he nevertheless portrays her as loving, reliable, and
mature; she willingly participates in the process of getting Joey help,
lavishes affection on him, and works long hours at a beauty salon to
support him. But in the third novel, as she herself admits, she
‘‘sink[s] to [the] level’’ of her ex-husband, utterly ignoring Joey’s
need for her to be a stable presence in his life (p. 35). Her outra-
geously bad behavior culminates in a fight in which she and Mr. Pigzaplay tug-of-war with Grandma Pigza’s dead body while Joey looks on
in horror.
Clearly, the fact that Mrs. Pigza works at the ‘‘Beauty and the Beast’’
hair salon is meant to provide a clue to her character. By the end of
What Would Joey Do?, it is just as difficult to empathize with her as
it was to sympathize with Grandma Pigza at the close of the first
book. But having witnessed the unlikely redemption of the latter,readers may well refrain from judging the former too harshly, espe-
cially since Joey once again acts as a role model in this regard; he
231Whacked-Out Partners
shows compassion for her from beginning to end, even though
many of the adults around him do not. In Joey Pigza Swallowed the
Key, for example, Joey notices that his physician jumps to an unfair
conclusion about his mother; told that Mrs. Pigza ‘‘couldn’t make it[…] this time,’’ the doctor ‘‘pursed his lips. ‘Right,’ he said dryly. As
if he were thinking, ‘Wrong.’ As if he were thinking my whole life
was wrong and it started with my mom because she didn’t care
enough about me to make it here’’ (p. 114). In contrast to the judg-
mental doctor, Joey understands that his mother cannot afford to
take the day off, and he also feels for her when the doctor gives her
a hard time during his next visit, sternly announcing that Joey’s
medicine must be supplemented by ‘‘positive family conditions’’(p. 140). ‘‘As soon as the doctor said ‘family conditions,’’’ Joey
notes, ‘‘Mom bit down on her lower lip and uncrossed her legs,
pulled down on her skirt, and crossed them the other way. I
reached over and squeezed her hand because I knew how it felt to
be in trouble’’ (p. 140).
Even though Joey realizes that his mother has made his life harder
by failing to provide a positive environment for him, he still empa-thizes with her. His ability to remain affectionate amazes Mrs. Pigza.
After Joey describes all the terrible things that happened after she
abandoned him, she asks, ‘‘‘So why, after all I’ve put you through,
do you still love me?’’’ (pp. 125--126). Joey replies, ‘‘‘I don’t know
why [. . .]. I just do. You’re my mom and I do’’’ (p. 126). He even
manages to continue caring for her after a painful confrontation
between the two of them in What Would Joey Do? Frantic with
worry because Pablo has been stolen, Joey runs to his mother forhelp, but she completely ignores his distress, complaining to him at
length about his father, and then abruptly announcing that she is
moving in with her new boyfriend. Telling Joey to stay with
Grandma Pigza, she leaves, and Joey states that ‘‘when [the door]
clicked shut, I felt something in me click shut too. It was my heart,
and it was locking her out, and it was locking me in, and that was
about the worst feeling I ever had’’ (p. 85). For a moment, Joey sits
absolutely still, trying to block out all feeling and thought, but thenhe asks himself what he should do and answers, ‘‘‘Unlock your heart
[. . .]. She needs you. She said so herself. So don’t flip out. Be
strong’’’ (p. 85).
This scene underscores the fact that Joey and his mother are
‘‘whacked-out partners’’ too. She was never simply his savior; rather,
they take turns being strong for each other. Thus, when Joey gets
into trouble at school in the first novel, she tells him, ‘‘‘When youwere a baby I screwed up and left you behind but I loved you so
much I pulled it together and came back to you. Now you have to
232 Children’s Literature in Education
pull it together for me. [. . .] It’s your turn’’’ (p. 82). Similarly, the
plot of Joey Pigza Loses Control does not simply involve him losing
control and her rescuing him. Rather, they take turns keeping each
other calm, as indicated by the fact that her first words to him whenshe arrives to save him at the end of the novel are, ‘‘Easy, partner’’
(p. 192). Gantos delineates the workings of this partnership during
the first scene. As Mrs. Pigza drives Joey to his dad’s house, she
catches his hand in hers to keep him from biting his fingernails.
Moments later, he notices that ‘‘[s]he was starting to get weepy so it
was my turn to settle her down’’ (p. 7). Right before they arrive, she
reassures him when he gets scared that ‘‘this whole thing is out of
whack’’ (p. 17). Afterwards, when she is warning Mr. Pigza not to‘‘mess with this kid,’’ Joey senses that
she was about to lose it. So it was my turn again to help her out. I reached for
her hand and when she glanced over at me I winked our giant eye-squishing
secret wink, which was a reminder to chill out. She smiled and instead of
going off the deep end, she stooped down by my side [… and] gave me a
hug.’’ (pp. 18--19)
When Joey and his grandma act as ‘‘whacked-out partners,’’ they
make each other crazier. In contrast, Joey and his mom keep each
other sane. Nevertheless, something feels ‘‘out of whack’’ about this
partnership as well; given that Joey is still struggling to solve his
own problems, it seems problematic that he must also help hismother to stay stable. Far from dismissing the disturbing aspect of
this situation, Gantos explores it at length in the final two novels,
suggesting that Joey’s uncanny ability to identify and empathize with
his parents actually jeopardizes his wellbeing, because it leads him
to try to fix their problems rather than taking good care of himself.
Thus, when Joey meets his father at the start of Joey Pigza Loses
Control, he quickly notes all the similarities between the two of
them; as he puts it, ‘‘we were so alike it was as if I had a gianttwin’’ (p. 180). Joey even manages to empathize with his father at
the awful moment when Mr. Pigza flushes Joey’s medicated patches
down the toilet in a misguided effort to help his son to be ‘‘a normal
kid’’ (p. 93). ‘‘I wanted him to stop telling me who I was when I
knew better’’ Joey says, but even as he realizes that he and his father
‘‘[a]re so far apart,’’ he still finds a point of identification; pond-
ering his father’s action, he concludes that ‘‘[h]e wanted me to be
something I wasn’t, and I wanted him to be something he wasn’t’’(p. 94).
Joey’s extraordinary ability to understand and relate to his father ulti-
mately leads him to feel responsible for fixing Mr. Pigza’s problems.
In the climactic scene of Joey Pigza Loses Control, Joey struggles to
lead his father’s baseball team to victory because he knows how
233Whacked-Out Partners
much Mr. Pigza wants to win and empathizes with this desire:
‘‘[Dad] was saying things to me about wanting to be a winner that I
always felt but had never said to anyone. And here we were, want-
ing to be winners together. [. . .] I didn’t want to let him down’’(p. 180). Deprived of his medicine, however, Joey cannot stay
focused: ‘‘[A]s I was falling apart I looked over at Dad [. . .] and I felt
as though his problem was my fault and if I could pull it together
and win the game then he would pull it together too’’ (p. 186). Joey
feels this way in part because his father keeps insisting that the two
of them are partners rather than parent and child. On one such
occasion, Mr. Pigza declares, ‘‘‘[Y]ou and I are a team. Right,
buddy?’’’, to which Joey warily responds, ‘‘‘You’re my dad’’’(p. 163). In fact, their relationship is completely one-sided, since
Mr. Pigza rarely stops talking and never listens to anything his son
says. Therefore, as Joey notes, ‘‘I knew how Dad felt about every-
thing. But Dad didn’t know how I felt about anything’’ (p. 29).
The plot of Joey Pigza Loses Control drives home the point that this
imbalanced relationship endangers Joey, who ‘‘unravel[s] at the
seams like a baseball that had been smacked around one too manytimes’’ (p. 181). In the final scene, Joey realizes that he has made a
mistake in associating himself so strongly with his father: ‘‘He
wasn’t like me only bigger [. . .]. He wasn’t like me at all’’ (p. 196).
By emphasizing the potentially disabling effects of empathy, Gantos
resists yet another common literary stereotype. As Claudia Mills
points out, many children’s books featuring disabled child protago-
nists extol empathy as the ultimate ‘‘compensatory talent’’: that is to
say, they suggest that while the disabled character ‘‘may have lessintelligence, in terms of measurable IQ, he or she has more of some-
thing else: usually more heart, more soul, more compassion for oth-
ers’’ (p. 539). But Gantos carefully avoids endorsing this idea. To
begin with, rather than suggesting that Joey’s ability to sympathize
with others is a lone virtue that makes up for his failings in other
areas, he stresses that his intelligent, articulate hero has many tal-
ents. Moreover, far from glorifying empathy, Gantos emphasizes that
Joey’s expertise in this area actually causes him problems, as thedisastrous events chronicled in the final book in the series attest.
The action of What Would Joey Do? revolves around Joey’s decision
to devote himself to selflessly serving others. ‘‘That’s my whole
thing now,’’’ he announces, ‘‘‘I’m Mr. Helpful’’’ (p. 64). Besides tak-
ing on the task of caring for Grandma Pigza, who is dying of emphy-
sema, he also agrees to act as a ‘‘secret helper’’ for Mrs. Lapp, the
instructor who runs the home school he has just started attending(p. 44). She asks Joey to set a good example by being nice to her
daughter Olivia, a ‘‘totally bratty’’ blind girl (p. 44). Driven by his
Claudia Mills, ‘‘The Por-trayal of Mental Disabil-ity in Children’sLiterature’’
234 Children’s Literature in Education
compassionate desire ‘‘to help everyone,’’ Joey persists in his efforts
to befriend Olivia even though she heaps verbal and physical abuse
on him and makes him cry (p. 178). Again, Gantos suggests that Joey
takes on such responsibility partly because the adults around himentreat him to function as an enabling partner rather than as a
dependent who needs support himself. Thus, when Joey runs to his
mother for assistance, Mrs. Pigza begs him, ‘‘‘Help me [. . .]. I need
you to help me by being strong for yourself right now. I need you
to buck up and do all the right things’’ (p. 81). In a response that
echoes the moment when he reminds his father, ‘‘You’re my dad,’’
Joey protests, ‘‘‘But I need you. [. . .] I’m just a boy’’’ (p. 81).
But once again, even as Joey resists the heavy demand his parent
places on him, he is seduced by the idea that he can be of service.
Thus, he notes that his mother’s request for aid ‘‘was like magic
words sprinkled over my head’’ (p. 81). Most of all, Joey wants to
help his parents stop fighting and sort out their lives. During the
motorcycle brawl, for example, he tries to persuade his mother to
ignore his father’s provocations, but she refuses to listen and instead
decides ‘‘to ambush [Dad] from behind the big silver statue of Jesus,who had his arms stretched out from side to side like someone try-
ing to stop a fight’’ (pp. 8--9). In this scene and in many others that
follow, Joey attempts to act as his parents’ savior; emulating Christ,
he tries to make peace and to help his parents become better peo-
ple. ‘‘‘That’s God’s job,’’’ protests Mrs. Lapp, but in fact she has
been encouraging him to model his behavior on Christ’s all along;
each morning, when he arrives at her school, she greets him by ask-
ing, ‘‘What would Jesus do?’’ (p. 173). Having learned that ‘‘Jesusloved children so much he died in order to help save them from the
sins they were born with,’’ Joey inverts this paradigm to suit his
own situation: although he is only a child, he tries to rescue sinning
adults (his parents) through the strength of his sympathetic identifi-
cation with them (p. 48). Thus, after his bleeding father is carried
away from the site of the motorcycle crash, Joey notes, ‘‘I don’t
know why I wanted to feel where his blood had made the dirt all
sticky, but as I patted the spot I felt sorry for him, as if my touchcould make his cut feel better’’ (p. 22).
But such intervention, Gantos emphasizes, can prove hazardous to
the helper’s health. Joey’s efforts to make peace between his parent
end up endangering his own well-being, as Grandma Pigza predicts
when she warns Joey, ‘‘‘All you can do is get trapped in the middle,
and anyone in the middle just gets squished’’’ (p. 65). Indeed, Joey
finds himself ‘‘stuck like the referee in the middle’’ of his parents’last and worst fight (p. 210). This painful scene forces Joey to realize
that he cannot afford to identify with his parents so strongly that he
235Whacked-Out Partners
loses sight of his own needs and desires. Rather, he must differenti-
ate himself from them and concentrate on ‘‘help[ing] himself’’; as he
explains to his mother in the final scene, ‘‘‘I don’t want to be like
you and Dad doing the same scary stuff over and over again. Dadgoes in circles. You have your ups and downs, and I just want to go
forward’’’ (pp. 227, 229). As Grandma Pigza has already pointed out,
Joey’s parents are locked in a vicious cycle, a point Gantos inge-
niously underlines by having Joey’s dad repeatedly ‘‘circl[e]’’ around
Mrs. Pigza’s house on his buzzing, beat-up motorcycle (p. 5).
Joey also realizes that he needs to stop identifying so closely with
Christ; rather than asking himself ‘‘What would Jesus do?’’ he beginsasking himself, ‘‘What would Joey do?’’ (p. 85). Gantos thus rejects
yet another common literary stereotype about disabled children:
namely, that they can and should function as paragons of perfect vir-
tue, saintly souls who purify and improve the people around them.
Perhaps the most famous example of this type is Dickens’ Tiny Tim,
but as Baskin and Harris point out, many twentieth-century chil-
dren’s books draw similarly idealized portraits of their child protago-
nists. For example, the self-effacing heroine of Lenora MattinglyWeber’s A Bright Star Falls (1969) thinks only of helping others,
and the positive effect she exerts on the people around her is
exactly the one that Joey longs to have: ‘‘loving warmth permeated
the room the minute she entered. Some magic in her […] drew out
the kindness and goodness in everyone’’ (p. 91). Similarly, the role
of the disabled heroine of Maia Wojciechowska’s A Single Light
(1968) is to reform the thoughtless, greedy townspeople who live in
her village. Her unselfish adoration for a valuable statue of the ChristChild makes her a role model for them. Indeed, she herself functions
as a Jesus figure, because her future is sacrificed to the cause of
helping the villagers learn to love.
As Baskin and Harris note, the effect of such texts is ironically simi-
lar to those that link disability and immorality; both types of narra-
tives set disabled characters apart as ‘‘significantly different from
[. . .] other people’’ (p. 18). In other words, whether such charactersare depicted as unnaturally sinful or unusually good, they emerge as
equally alien beings. Grandma Pigza underscores this point when
she sarcastically tells Joey that he is ‘‘‘the best helper the world has
ever known. I think you even beat out Gunga Din’’’ (p. 147). Kip-
ling’s famous Indian servant is the ultimate oppressed ‘‘Other’’; ver-
bally and physically abused by the white British soldiers he serves,
he sacrifices his own life to help a wounded officer survive, by
bringing him water on the battlefield. By comparing Joey to GungaDin rather than Jesus, Grandma Pigza prods her grandson to realize
that the most likely result of self-effacement is self-destruction.
Lenora MattinglyWeber, A Bright Star
Falls
236 Children’s Literature in Education
Rather than celebrating and adoring him, she maintains, people will
treat him like ‘‘a doormat’’ (p. 148). The plot of What Would Joey
Do? proves her right and helps to expose the absurdity of the idea
that the disabled should sacrifice themselves to the cause of helpingothers become better people.
Reviewing the second Joey Pigza book for the New York Times
Books Review, Linnea Lannon praises the series for its lack of didac-
ticism, assuring readers that ‘‘Joey Pigza Loses Control is not an
agenda book’’ (p. 20). But as I have shown, Gantos does have a
detailed pedagogic agenda. Readers are apt to overlook it, however,
because his didacticism is directed not at the audience we mightexpect—that is to say, child readers—but rather at adults who come
into contact with disabled children, including parents, educators,
authors, and doctors. Joey’s relationship with the Lapp family pro-
vides a final piece of proof for this claim. Enlisting Joey to help her
reform her difficult daughter, Mrs. Lapp reveals a distinct lack of sen-
sitivity when she says, ‘‘‘[Y]ou can be my secret helper by showing
Olivia how even a kid with big problems can be nice’’’ (pp. 44).
Joey ‘‘hate[s]’’ being defined this way, and, as he quickly discovers,Olivia misbehaves because she ‘‘hate[s]’’ the way her mother infan-
tilizes her (pp. 44, 57). Mrs. Lapp’s mission in life is ‘‘to protec[t]
Olivia’’; despite the fact that her daughter begs her, ‘‘‘Don’t treat me
like a baby,’’’ she refuses to allow Olivia to venture outside at night
or go with Joey to see Godspell (pp. 173--174).
After getting to know the Lapps, Joey comes to the conclusion that
Olivia is not the one who needs help. As he explains it, ‘‘I decidedthat when Mrs. Lapp had said she secretly needed my help, it really
meant that I had to secretly help her understand Olivia. I’m sure she
didn’t think of it that way. I figured I had to make her see what
Olivia saw inside herself’’ (p. 214). In other words, he has to teach
Mrs. Lapp to empathize with her daughter. Attempting to persuade
Mrs. Lapp to let Olivia see Godspell, Joey responds to her statement
that she feels uncomfortable with the show’s portrayal of religion by
saying, ‘‘‘I know how you feel [. . .]. But do you know how Oliviafeels about it?’’’ (p. 215). Even after Olivia disabuses her mother of
the notion that ‘‘Olivia feels the same way I do,’’ Mrs. Lapp still hesi-
tates, until Joey turns back on her the question that she always asks
him: ‘‘‘W.W.J.D.?’ I shouted when I caught her eye. […] ‘He’d let
Joey take Olivia,’’’ admits Mrs. Lapp (p. 216). Traditional roles are
inverted: the adult teacher does not educate the child; rather, the
pupil educates the instructor, while managing—as the official tea-
cher does not—to keep his intervention secret. Whereas Oliviaimmediately perceives that her mother has asked Joey to function as
her ‘‘secret helper,’’ Mrs. Lapp never realizes that Joey has come to
Linnea Lannon,‘‘Wired’’
237Whacked-Out Partners
her aid. ‘‘I wanted to tell Mrs. Lapp that I had helped her see the
light,’’ Joey observes, ‘‘but [I] didn’t. I pressed my lips together tigh-
ter than ever because if I opened my mouth, I might mess things up
by saying too much’’ (p. 216).
In most cases, the act of setting up the child as a teacher figure sug-
gests that the author in question is endorsing a Romantic vision of
the child as a revitalizing force for good. But the truly striking thing
about the Joey Pigza series is Gantos’ determined refusal to let his
story settle into familiar resolutions of praise or blame. Just as he
prevents readers from vilifying Joey’s grandmother and other imper-
fect adults, so too he avoids sanctifying Joey, who cheerfully refersto himself as ‘‘an encyclopedia of imperfections,’’ and who com-
pletely fails to improve, convert, or redeem any of the flawed
grown-ups around him (p. 50). Thus, Mrs. Lapp continues to act in
an extremely over-protective way towards Olivia, just as Joey’s par-
ents continue to have the same fights over and over again. The only
solution offered is that Joey must become more self-protective;
rather than trying to reform others, Gantos suggests, he should sim-
ply function as a good role model whom others can emulate if theychoose. And indeed, after Joey finally begins to focus on helping
himself, his mother notices how mature he has become, and inde-
pendently starts to entertain the idea of emulating him. In the last
moments of the final scene, she echoes one of her son’s favorite
phrases, prompting a delighted Joey to note, ‘‘I grinned because I
liked that she was imitating me’’ (p. 228).
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Kieran Setiya and Don Gray for their detailed and
incredibly helpful feedback on drafts of this essay. I am also grateful
to Elissa Bell, Susan Gubar, Phil Nel, Katharine Capshaw Smith, the
anonymous readers at CLE, and the students in my ‘‘Critical
Approaches to Children’s Literature’’ class, all of whom haveenriched my appreciation of the Joey Pigza books.
Notes
1. Educators have attested to the power of the Joey Pigza books to enable
empathy on ‘‘Child_Lit,’’ an electronic discussion group organized and
run by Rutgers University. Moreover, in a recent interview in The Kansas
City Star, Jack Gantos stated, ‘‘I receive hundreds of letters from children
who are motivated to write mostly because they empathize with Joey
Pigza’s life’’ (Eberhart, 2003).
2. For example, the first scene of the novel finds him spinning around
‘‘really fast’’ in the hallway at school, while later incidents at home fea-
238 Children’s Literature in Education
ture him ‘‘run[ning]’’ ‘‘hopping,’’ ‘‘zipp[ing]’’ ‘‘bouncing’’ and ‘‘dart[ing]
across the room’’ (5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16).
3. In Notes from a Different Drummer: A Guide to Juvenile Fiction Por-
traying the Handicapped (1977), Barbara H. Baskin and Karen H. Harris
confirm that ‘‘Humor is rarely used’’ in children’s books about the dis-
abled that appeared between 1940 and 1975 (p. 55). Their second study,
More Notes from a Different Drummer (1984), covers literature pub-
lished from 1976 to 1981; and once again, they note that ‘‘most’’ of these
texts ‘‘are serious in tone’’ (p. 40). Partly for this reason, including humor
in such stories can be a risky move. Comedic moments involving a dis-
abled child can easily be interpreted as jokes occurring at the expense of
that child. Indeed, at least one contributor to the ‘‘Child_Lit’’ discussion
of the Joey Pigza books felt this way about Gantos’ series; s/he main-
tained that readers are invited to laugh at Joey because of the predica-
ments he gets into as a result of having AD/HD.
4. Two more texts about children with AD/HD that perpetuate this idea are
Laurie Lears’ Waiting for Mr. Goose (1989) and Kathleen M. Dwyer’s
What Do You Mean I Have an Attention Deficit Disorder? (1996), both
of which feature child protagonists who love to commune with wild
creatures.
References
Baskin, Barbara H. and Karen H. Harris, More Notes From a Different Drum-
mer: A Guide to Juvenile Fiction Portraying the Disabled. New York:
R. R. Bowker, 1984.
Baskin, Barbara H. and Karen H. Harris, Notes From a Different Drummer:
A Guide to Juvenile Fiction Portraying the Handicapped. New York:
R. R. Bowker, 1977.
Eberhart, John Mark, ‘‘The Truth About Jack Gantos: Author Connects with
Young Readers,’’ The Kansas City Star on the Web, 18 April 2003. http://
www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/living/5639887.htm
Gantos, Jack, Joey Pigza Loses Control. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2000.
Gantos, Jack, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998.
Gantos, Jack, What Would Joey Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2002.
Gehret, Jeanne, Eagle Eyes: A Child’s Guide to Paying Attention. Illus.
Susan Covert. Fairport, NY: Verbal Images Press, 1991.
Lannon, Linnea, ‘‘Wired,’’ The New York Times Book Review, 19 Novem-
ber. 2000, 20.
Mills, Claudia. ‘‘The Portrayal of Mental Disability in Children’s Literature:
An Ethical Appraisal,’’ Horn Book Magazine 78:5 (September--October
2002): 531--542.
Shreve, Susan, Trout and Me. New York: Random House, 2002.
Weber, Lenora Mattingly, A Bright Star Falls. New York: Crowell, 1959.
239Whacked-Out Partners