5 Novels: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars / Slaves of Spiegel / The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death / The Last Guru / Young Adult Novel

I loved loved loved Pinkwater as a kid, and after rescuing 5 Novels from my childhood bookshelf and deciding that I needed a break, I went back for a reread. And you know what, Pinkwater still holds up as an absurdist delight. His protagonists are deeply uncool short fat weirdos, embedded in mediocre suburban high schools and conformist families who don’t get them, but who enter a slipstream world of lunatic obsessives and high concept scifi weirdness.

My two favorite stories are The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, which uses cult classic movies as an entry point into a missing mad scientist and a journey into the underground life of the big city, with a whole bunch of crazy stuff along the way. Young Adult Novel is a perfect Dadist antifable, about a high school Dadist club who stage an event to make an even weirder kid a schoolwide hero that spins ridiculously out of control.

The other stories are not quite as good. Slaves of Spiegel is stylish fluff. Alan Mendelsohn is meaner than I remember, but has a great tour of psychic weirdness and alternate dimensions. The Last Guru’s parody of Age of Aquarius mysticism has lost whatever sharpness it once had.

But on the whole, these are fun, stylish, and altogether great young adult novels.