Goodreads | Holes

Chris rated it:

06/01/08

Read in May, 2008

I was picking up some books at the resale shop and for some reason found myself browsing in the children’s books. It seemed like the usual fare at first, some Dr. Seuss, a mangy copy of a Clifford book, a few ratty Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, Hugh Hefner’s autobiography, some smut called “The Very Virile Viking”, and “Pimp” by Iceberg Slim. Tucked amongst all this tawdry trash was something called “Holes”, which seemed to make sense sandwiched between “Pimp” and H...more I was picking up some books at the resale shop and for some reason found myself browsing in the children’s books. It seemed like the usual fare at first, some Dr. Seuss, a mangy copy of a Clifford book, a few ratty Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, Hugh Hefner’s autobiography, some smut called “The Very Virile Viking”, and “Pimp” by Iceberg Slim. Tucked amongst all this tawdry trash was something called “Holes”, which seemed to make sense sandwiched between “Pimp” and Hef’s life saga.

I soon realized that there was a movie based on this book made a few years back, which I had never bothered with, but, to my shock and awe, “Holes” was the work of Louis “Sideways-Stories” Sachar. As a long-time fan of the preposterous “Wayside School” stories, I immediately picked this up (along with the other aforementioned books) and decided to bump it up on my to-read list. I had no idea Sachar had even done any other work, and I was interested to see what he’d bring to the table.

I have to admit, I wasn’t nearly as impressed with “Holes” as I thought I might be. This might be due to the unrealistically high expectations I had based on my previous Sachar experience, or the fact that since they took the time and bankroll to make a movie based off this work, it obviously had to be incredible.

The palindromically-named Stanley Yelnats is a good-spirited and festively plump little kid who is shipped off to a boy’s reform program at Camp Green Lake as punishment for stealing a pair of shoes being donated to charity by Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston. However, poor Stanley never stole the shoes, he’s been wrongfully accused, which is something he’s accustomed to, since his family is under the influence of a malevolent gypsy curse which began due to an oversight by his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. This evil hex has brought misery and financial ruin to the Yelnats clan since it was first laid, and each male heir to the Yelnats throne vainly hopes to be the one to break this vicious cycle. It isn’t looking too promising for Stanley to be the chosen one, as he’s shipped off to Camp Green Lake, which is the dusty basin of a once-flourishing lake which has since dried up under the scorching desert sun. His duty at the Camp is torturous; each day he must wake up at cock-crow and dig a hole five feet deep by five feet wide, while eluding the venomous yellow-spotted lizards which infest the area. Spitting in each completed hole is optional, and Stanley opts for this luxury at the insistence of his peers.

The narrative of Stanley’s troubles at the camp are intertwined with the background of how this dread gypsy curse came about and also with the story of “Kissing” Katie Barlow, an outlaw that robbed his great-grandfather. While Stanley toils to dig hole after hole under the strict rule of the Warden and her lackeys (Mr. Pendanski and Mr. Sir), the tale of the curse unfolds, in which his great-great-grandfather Elya is vying for the hand of wealthy hottie Myra back in their motherland of Latvia. In order to win her hand, Myra’s father stipulates that the stud who presents the choicest pig as a gift will get the girl (which I hear is still a popular practice back in Riga), which leads Elya into cahoots with the gypsy, Madame Zeroni. Things take a turn for the worse for Elya, and he ends up not only forgetting to perform a favor for the gypsy, but he also gives away the hog as a wedding present to his rival. Even more spectacular is the downfall of the kind-hearted Katie Barlow, a benevolent teacher who begins an interracial relationship with an onionmonger named Sam in the Green Lake area. The ignorant townsfolk don’t cotton to this pairing and end up killing Sam (and his onion-chomping mule, Mary Lou), which leads the once-peaceful teacher to life as an outlaw. Barlow also happened to rob Stanley’s great-grandfather, and before kicking the bucket, she ended up burying all her ill-gotten gains somewhere in the parched and dry bowl of the former lake, a treasure yet to be unearthed that the Warden presumably is trying to locate with all this absurd hole-digging.

The story is pretty enjoyable, for the most part it follows in the silly tradition of the Sachar work I am familiar with, however, the fact that he had to throw a ‘message’ in there pretty much turned me off. Stanley and his fellow detainees at the Camp are a motley bunch, a mixed-race group of transgressors who are coming to terms with their own cultural identities. When Stanley makes an arrangement with black camper Zero to teach him to read in exchange for his labor, the others drop some ‘slave’ references. The saga of Katie Barlow and Sam, however, far eclipses this childish prattle, and firmly beats the reader of the head with the ‘love-your-brother’-stick. At one point, Sachar even states that god himself punished the intolerant populous of Green Lake using the 100 year drought that turned a thriving lake into a dust bowl. The whole race relations bit was generally annoying, and perhaps what might have bothered me most was that in his preaching, Sachar makes it clear how wrong it is to consider someone of color illiterate, stupid, or treacherous, but it’s fully acceptable to include the stereotype of a curse-casting gypsy thrown into the storyline.

Overall, the story comes together predictably and nicely, but the insistence with which Sachar clubbed me over the head with his ‘message’ bothered me.
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