Paul Zindel: Flirting with the bizarre

Teaching Pre K-8, Nov 1994 by Winarski, Diana L

You can ask Paul Zindel where pigeons go to die, how many nuns died in a particular bed in a Staten Island castle, or if there are good witches or bad witches at Stonehenge. He knows. And he's willing to tell you.

After our first few minutes at Paul's Manhattan apartment, we learned that this dynamic author's new paperback series from Skylark (an imprint of Bantam Doubleday Dell) isn't named "The Wacky Facts Lunch Bunch" by coincidence. Bizarre and sometimes downright frightening truths seem to thrust themselves on this unassuming man. And like a true writer, he collects these facts and turns them into fiction, fiction with fantastic titles such as Attack of the Killer Fishsticks, Fifth Grade Safari and My Darling, My Hamburger.

If the titles alone aren't enough to intrigue you, flip any of his books open to any page and you're guaranteed to be struck by Paul's off-key humor. I tried this with Attack, and this is what I got: "Max's father was a tall skinny man dressed in a Navy uniform...but I thought he looked like Dracula's brother, because Mr. Millner had really white skin and red scary eyes. He came striding down the hallway toward us as if he were in a rush to sink his teeth into us." Mind you, these words come from the mouth of a fifth grader.

A few years ago, a graduate class at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on Paul Zindel and his work for an entire semester, and as its culminating activity, the class invited him to listen to what they had learned about his brain. "How can you pass that up?" he said to us.

After two and a half hours, however, Paul was bored. They weren't saying anything that was new to him. And then in the last half hour they hit on something. The students told Paul that his writing style was a combination of hyperbole and pathos, that he takes small everyday matters and turns them into grandiose affairs so that they become almost comic. He does the reverse, too, making subjects like death insignificant and therefore more palatable.

Paul never realized this, but in looking at the memorable titles of his more than 15 young adult novels, it was obvious. "Confessions of a Teenage Baboon brings something that's both lofty and religious--confessions--down to a slang level; it's flirting with oxymorons, really," he proposed. "It's also illuminating. I learned that without pathos and hyperbole, I couldn't get any energy. And it's energy that gives the books an enduring quality.

"They also told me that left to my own devices, I might only paint the black side of it. I have to have balance and maintain a sense of beauty."

Originally titled, Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball (this title was used for a later novel), The Pigman was Paul's first novel, inspired by something as simple as a teenage boy trespassing on his lawn, a girl who cried at the mention of death and a lonely old man.

These ingredients, unknowingly accumulated throughout his life, were pulled from the shelf when Charlotte Zolotow, a Harper & Row editor, wrote to Paul after seeing a PBS production of Paul's stage play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. She wanted to know if there were any novels he wanted to write for young people. There were.

The Pigman, though it was written more than 25 years ago, is still a favorite. Why? Because in true Zindel fashion, the book examines the not-so-perfect life of a teenager whose father is an alcoholic and whose mother threatens suicide almost daily. But it isn't morbid or depressing.

More than anything, Paul's zany sense of humor shines through and attracts readers who suffer from "typical" problems such as hating school and authority figures, the problems of being 10 or 12 or 16.

In speaking about his love of traveling, Paul told us of a 16th century inn he visited near Stonehenge in England, The Haunch of Venison Inn. "You just can't imagine a name like that on your own; you have to see it." Similarly, he doesn't just conjure the problems of adolescence. Many of the dilemmas in his novels come from the lives of his two children, David and Elizabeth, who are now both in college.

In most ways, though, his writing reflects his own life. The autobiographical The Pigman and Me explores Paul's turbulent upbringing with a mother who thought she could get rich breeding dogs that looked like Lassie, or by hand coloring black and white photographs.

Luckily, "Nonno Frankie," an Italian grandfather figure, taught Paul how to embrace life when everything around him seemed dead. It was Nonno Frankie who helped the Paul in The Pigman & Me figure out he would be a writer. The real Paul had to explore other avenues first.

A Chemistry major at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York, Paul spent six months after graduation as a chemical writer. "I wept with joy when I quit," he proudly told us. "That was the most brilliant idea I ever had." To Paul, technical writing was lethal, and when he finally sat down and figured out that he would spend three months each year commuting on public transportation, he walked out and "stumbled toward teaching."