Title: Lunch Money
Author: Andrew Clements
Date: 2007
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-0-689-86683-8
Length: 222 pages
Illustrations: pencil drawings by Brian Selznick
Quote: “Greg’s greatest talent had always been money.”
Even before he started school, we’re told, Greg enjoyed earning, saving, and eventually spending money. He started by doing his older brothers’ chores for pennies, then moved into doing odd jobs. Then one day at school he noticed how many of the other middle-schoolers had pocket money to spare when he forgot his lunch money, and started selling pocket toys for his friends’ pocket money. The principal’s reaction was to ban all toys. Greg started writing, drawing, printing, and selling original comic books. The principal wanted to ban that too, because right away a few other kids started selling their own “books,” and the principal didn’t want the school to become “a flea market.”
Andrew Clements’ greatest talent has always been writing plausible “What if a kid...?”stories that illustrate what’s not likely, but possible, if kids do what it takes...to add a new word to the dictionary (Frindle), or to become a small publishing venture. And he’s right on target. The biggest challenge kids face, when they come up with ideas for earning their own money, is that some adults really don’t want kids to have their own money.
Adults want kids to be honest and ethical. Kids want to be honest and ethical, and they also want to have and do things that appeal to them, without necessarily taking the time to “sell” some adult or other on everything they fancy. When adults cling to control fantasies, blustering that fifth-graders (and older people) “don’t need to be able to buy junkfood,”or comic books or pocket toys or whatever, some parents can boast of some success in brainwashing their kids not to want junkfood—sometimes—but even goody-goody kids who’ve tried very hard to believe that buying a chocolate bar will give them acne, and that they would want not to have acne, are still likely to think they want this particular toy, or whatever. So they might start skipping lunch and hoarding their lunch or milk money...or they might decide that, in a world where adults just don’t want them to have anything they see other children enjoying, they have a right to steal either the objects or the money they want.
I once heard a sixth-grader explain that she stole a twenty-dollar bill from an adult’s purse to buy a cross pendant necklace to show schoolmates she was a Christian.
Yes, adults can try to tighten their grip on all access to the outside world and bring up children who will really stand out, when they have to look for jobs in the outside world, as too eccentric to be employable. There are people who became unemployable to the church that had supported the rigid rules that were meant to make a virtue of an economic necessity, because they really believed that some extravagance or other was contrary to the Spirit of God. And the extravagance may be trivial, but the way their refusal to embrace it has been persecuted convinces some of these people, and convinces me, that it really is contrary to the Spirit of God.
If adults aren’t able—as Amish people are—to guarantee their children a secure position in an independent economic community where they’ll be able to earn modest livings and achieve a reasonable level of status among adults, then those adults had better not be allowed to cling to any delusions about teaching their children a “better” approach to money than good old small-scale capitalism. But unfortunately that’s become a fad these days, not even among small religious sects, but among people who consider themselves “liberal.”
The real motive is control. “It’s so sweet and lovable and innocent when children come to you begging ‘Please, Mommy, please, Daddy’...”Yes, and when we consider the kind of skills that’s teaching those children, let’s just hope Mommy and Daddy will always be able to bail them out of jail. Some parents fantasize that they’re bringing up future teachers or doctors when they are in fact training future beggars, pickpockets, and prostitutes. The rationalization used to be keeping children out of bad company, teaching them thrift, or preparing girls to be “angels in the home." Today few people take those ideas seriously, so control-freak parents have to appeal to the political cults of yesteryear. “We don’t want Alex to grow up a greedy, money-grubbing yuppie...”
Normal healthy children do not like to go to adults begging. Nature intended them to become adults, and that is the primary goal of most things children do between, say, ages five and fifteen. They like to earn their own money and spend it as they see fit.
So, our protagonist, Greg, sees school as a place to earn money because he sees that it’s a place where children are expected, even required, to spend money and have a lot of money to spend. Adults don’t want him to earn money at school, however, because some of them are control freaks...and others are profiting from protectionist contracts.
Greg, being an Andrew Clements character, does almost everything right. His mistakes are minor and quickly corrected, so they form part of a story that’s basically about how the child reader can succeed. Greg takes a bump on the nose, realizes the teacher looking at him is having a phobic reaction, and makes a horrible little speech about how, yes, his nose is “bleeding lots of bloody, bloody blood.” The mere word “blood” makes poor phobic Mr. Z. feel so queasy that he feels a need to lie on the floor.
Er, well, actually I suspect that a sixth grade boy would be thinking in pictures, and the picture in his mind would be of what naturally happens next if people who are feeling queasy enough to lie down continue to feel even a tiny bit sicker.
But anyway Greg and Mr. Z. bond by lying on the floor and waiting for someone to press ice packs on their heads, and Mr. Z. agrees to be the adult consultant as Greg recruits his strongest competitor as a partner in producing clever, informative, nonviolent cartoon books.
That competitor is a girl, Maura. Some sixth grade boys feel physically attracted to girls in a vague way. Probably more of them feel embarrassed by the idea that talking to girls might cause them to be teased about things they don’t understand. A fortunate few have sisters and know that, in grade six, talking to a girl is pretty similar to talking to a boy—individual personalities make more of a difference than gender. Then there’s a small, in some ways unfortunate, few who do in fact have the hormone reactions most sixth grade students can only embarrass each other about. Even when students this age are shaving facial hair or wearing bras, most of them are not feeling physical attractions yet. So why Clements chose to make Greg one of the few who has “feelings” other than the basic “Do I want this person as a friend and, if so, on what terms” feeling...was probably in hopes of marketing the book to grade eight, where more students do have special physical “feelings” about some classmates that they don’t have about all the others. Some readers will like the idea that Greg and Maura will become a couple and possibly marry each other in another ten years, and some will hate it. So, trigger warning. Maybe some books should reassure kids that they’re not going to die of freakishness if they have feelings at eleven that many people start having at fifteen. Maybe adults should blame the estrogen-fattened meat.
Greg and Maura and Mr. Z. now have to convince the principal that her argument that “school is a place for learning and thinking, not for buying and selling,” is unrealistic. When students buy food, pencils and paper, maybe school jackets and sports equipment, in a school store, then school is a place for buying and selling. And what a pity the school’s decisions are made by a “council of principals” rather than a board of elected members of the community, in which there would probably be a good healthy exponent of an (enlightened) capitalist position: School stores should, in fact, set a goal of having more than half the merchandise made and sold by students and their parents. What a pity, for that matter, Greg’s and Maura’s parents leave it entirely up to a teacher to advocate for their children’s economic rights to become entrepreneurs in a free, non-protectionist market system.
If anything, I think Clements handles the control-freak principal more gently than control freaks deserve. And why the relationships between the students and their parents aren’t developed further...Sometimes writers back away from trying to write about parent-child relationships because, even as adults, the writers are still learning from those relationships. Sometimes writers don’t want people who know that the writers have stayed close to their own parents to think that the writers’fictional characters’family relationships are just like the writers’family relationships. Well. If writers were more reticent about romantic relationships, for similar reasons, the improvement in some fiction would be considerable.
I find Greg and Maura, their relationship with each other, and their relationships with their parents, a bit of a strain on my suspension of disbelief, but their experience of producing “Chunky Comics”is probably what actual sixth grade students will read this book for, and that is excellent. Selznick’s illustrations even give young cartoonists ideas for layout.
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