Next month, Penguin U.K. will issue a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” under its Modern Classics imprint, with a cover design that is strangely but tellingly misbegotten. The image is a photograph, taken from a French fashion shoot, of a glassy-eyed, heavily made-up little girl. Behind her sits a mother figure, stiff and coiffed, casting an ominous shadow. The girl, with her long, perfectly waved platinum-blond hair and her pink feather boa, looks like a pretty and inert doll—one immediate association is with JonBenét Ramsey. As Sarah Kaplan noted in the Washington Post, “much of the literary world was not sold on the rebranding. Why did the cover of a novel about five kids and a wonderful—if admittedly bizarre—candy-maker look like a scene from ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’? Commenters on Penguin’s Facebook page called it ‘creepy,’ ‘sexualized’ and ‘inappropriate garbage.’ ”
You can imagine what the designers were getting at. Dahl is darker and edgier than most beloved children’s authors. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the obnoxious children suffer ignominious comeuppances—one falls into a filthy garbage chute; another blows up like a giant blueberry—and these are observed with sadistic glee by Willy Wonka and the author alike. The trouble is that the designers went for the wrong sort of darkness. One thing that Dahl’s books for children are not is sexually perverse, or indeed sexual at all. (His macabre stories for adults, which sometimes feature sexual cruelty, are another matter.) And if the Stepford daughter on the cover is meant to remind us of Veruca Salt or Violet Beauregarde, she doesn’t: those badly behaved squirts are bubbling over with rude life.
As I wrote in my essay “The Candy Man,” published in this magazine in 2005, Dahl had the sensibility of a rambunctious child—happy to traffic in fart jokes, in love with making up words (“bumplehammers,” “muckfrumping”), churlish about the elders in charge. When Dahl was a homesick boy attending a British boarding school, in the early nineteen-thirties, he enjoyed one particularly sweet respite from canings and bullying: Cadbury, as he recalls in his memoir, “Boy,” relied on pupils at his school to test out new chocolate bars. Dahl never forgot the delights of that plain gray box full of unknown confections, and the thrill of passing judgment. The comforts that his books offer children are primal: revenge, candy, cheerful uncouthness, and the knowledge that a grownup somewhere sympathizes with them instinctively. Dahl’s young characters always have agency; their magic powers or ingenious schemes—what their adult overlords consider misbehavior—always save the day. The Modern Classics cover has not a whiff of this validation of childish imagination; instead, it seems to imply a deviant adult audience.
It is possible and desirable to create cheeky modern covers for classics. Penguin itself has done so beautifully with its Graphic Deluxe editions, which feature covers drawn by noted illustrators and cartoonists. The new designs make the old books look like hip, vital collectibles, but they also convey something essential about the work of literature inside. The artist Ruben Toledo’s cover for “Wuthering Heights,” for example, which is edged by windswept tree branches like black lace, has the panache of a fashion drawing. On the cover of “The Jungle,” the skinned cow’s head, by Charles Burns, mimics the blunt force of the book. A Dahl title in the same series, “James and the Giant Peach,” gets a bright, contemporary cover by Jordan Crane, with cartoon panels, a tumbling red-headed boy, and fuzzy lettering that calls to mind a peach. The Quentin Blake drawings that usually adorn Dahl’s books are winning—their loose style softened Dahl’s sharpness and emphasized his silly humor. But there are other ways to bring out the best in Dahl, as that particular Penguin edition shows.
It seems likely that the Modern Classics cover of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is an example of a new trend: enticing older readers to buy books intended for children and young adults by publishing them with covers that look sophisticated. Read it on the subway, read it in a bar—no need to feel sheepish. When I was reporting my article about the Y.A. author John Green and his novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” a number of the people I spoke with in publishing mentioned how important the book’s cover was in helping it to reach adult readers, who make up an increasing proportion of Y.A. fans. Instead of a photograph of, say, a cute girl in a tank top, surrounded by a pink border, it features only the scrawled text of the title. The new edition of “Charlie” isn’t one most of us would choose as a gift for a kid—or even to read aloud to a kid, which is strange, since that has got to be the most rewarding experience an adult could have with the book.
In the great debate about whether adults who read young-adult literature should be ashamed of the habit, I am not in the shaming camp. (Children’s books like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” stretch matters a bit; I don’t quite see the point in reading them all by oneself.) The critic Ruth Graham reignited that contretemps this summer in an essay in Slate, arguing that there is something embarrassing and diminishing about adults reading Y.A. books, the enjoyment of which has so much to do with, in her words, “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.” Graham has a point, certainly. An adult who reads only Y.A. is a bit like one who has taken up permanent residence in her childhood bedroom without even switching out the posters. For the most part, Y.A. novels are less complex and demanding than literary fiction meant for adults, and they are saturated with the concerns of just one stage of life. But most of the adults I know who read young-adult novels read other kinds of books, too. Many read Y.A. because they take an empathetic interest in what the teen-agers in their lives care about. In fact, that’s one of the important explanations for the genre’s popularity: parents who are or want to be closer to their kids than previous generations were. And the best Y.A. novels offer the experience of an extended foray into someone else’s mind, one of the higher pleasures of fiction.
That adults are reading young-adult books does not necessarily augur badly for the state of fiction or intellectual life. What does seem discouraging is that this literary debate is one of the liveliest going on these days. It’s doesn’t have quite the gusto of New Criticism versus historicism, or of the Allan Bloom-era debate over the Western canon, or of Tom Wolfe’s call, a quarter century ago, in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," for more social realism in fiction. We shouldn’t begrudge adults their enjoyment of Y.A. books. But we can still have priorities. It’s better when book covers attract young people to complex literature—like the Penguin Graphic Deluxe covers seem to do—than when they lure adults to books meant for kids.
