Marah Gubar - Longwood University Gubar ‘‘Whacked-Out Partners’’: The Inversion of Empathy in the Joey Pigza Trilogy This essay traces how Jack Gantos’ Joey Pigza trilogy

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


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,


‘‘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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


‘‘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


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


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


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’’


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


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


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’’


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-


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:

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Documents

Marah Gubar - Longwood University Gubar ‘‘Whacked-Out Partners’’: The Inversion of Empathy in the Joey Pigza Trilogy This essay traces how Jack Gantos’ Joey Pigza trilogy