Paul Zindel

Paul Zindel, whose young adult novels helped define the genre, died of cancer in New York City on March 27, 2003. He was 66 years old. A former high school chemistry teacher on his native Staten Island, he came to fame first as a playwright, winning the 1971 Pultizer Prize in drama for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. In 2002, he won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for the body of his work.

We remember him here with our February 1969 review of his first novel, The Pigman (HarperCollins).

Paul Zindel, The Pigman

When young people ask for another book like It’s Like This, Cat, give them The Pigman. It’s a “now” book, a thoroughly contemporary, sensitive — and shocking — first novel. Lorraine and John are high-school sophomores: Are they villains or victims? Wild, wise kids whose selfish, irresponsible actions cause an old man’s death? Or frightened children, clinging to the never-never land of their Staten Island Childhood, prolonging innocence with foolish clowning and silly games? At the edge of adulthood, escaping from the example set by neurosis-ridden, anxiety-laden parents, they stumble into a relationship, tender and complex, humorous and heartbreaking, with an ugly, lonely old man. Few books that have been written for young people are as cruelly truthful about the human condition. Fewer still accord the elderly such serious consideration or perceive that what we term senility may be a symbolic return to youthful honesty and idealism.

Reviewed by Diane Farrell

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