It is Thursday, February 25th, and it seems like the world is about to end.
Sorry, hard to get certain things out of my mind.
"It's Not the End of the World" is a 1972 young adult novel by Judy Blume, detailing the life of a sixth grader whose parents are undergoing a divorce. Like much of Blume's books, it was groundbreaking and controversial when first released, and also like much of her work, it has remained in print for decades, becoming a perennial favorite.
Karen Newman is a pretty typical sixth grader who does okay at school and has one close friend. She has an older brother and a younger sister, as well as some aunts and uncles. Her life is going okay until escalating fights between her parents get worse and worse. One day in late February, her father doesn't come home. She soon must learn that her parents are divorcing, which at the time of the book's writing, was a major scandal. Friends and family react to this news with varying level of acceptance. In the climax of the book, her older brother Jeff, runs away from home, which instead of leading to a reconciliation between her parents, leads to an even more terrible fight. At the end of the book, everyone has reached some acceptance about the new state of affairs, although it isn't a cheery ending. It is just, as the title suggests, not the end of the world.
I noticed a few thing about this book, some of them interrelated. One is that (at least in books like this) Judy Blume is one of the least stylized writers I have ever read, and the book is in a certain way very boring---but that it ends up working, because she manages to write almost precisely in the voice of a 12 year old girl, with only a few hints of dramatic irony shining through. (Such as when Karen meets a "sophisticated older girl" who is a few months older and "knows everything" about divorce.) The lack of too much narrative trickery also makes it a very easy book to read---I sat down and read 200 pages in one sitting. But the straight-forward prose also makes the book more dramatic. As I wrote previously, the rise of dystopian and paranormal young adult fiction mean that we usually will just take it for granted that a typical teen girl is on the run from a global conspiracy AND has a hot vampire boyfriend--- but that because this is all so clearly stylized, it is less dramatic than when Judy Blume writes a story of a smashed plate through the eyes of a twelve year old. Even reading it as a 42 year old, decades after divorce became much more normal, I could still feel the pain in the story, as plainly as it is presented.
But I admit that on that point, I did have a few moments when the book's focus did seem unusual to my sensibilities. There are two incidents in the book where a parent hits a child, something at the time would have been considered unpleasant (in both cases, the parent apologizes), but now would be considered child abuse. Also, in the book's penultimate scene, Karen's older brother Jeff runs away from home---something that is dealt with by a single visit from the police, and not with a full scale search, like I imagine would happen today. So it did feel a little bit odd that the book's main focus was on the divorce, and that things that I would see as more dramatic today were just incidents along the way.
Still, after reading this book, I understand why it is a classic, and why it was so important when it was released. This is especially the case when I compare it to many modern YA novels that, despite having so many more pyrotechnics, manage to communicate so much less about growing up.