Sideways Stories from Wayside School

In a pessimistic and reductive overstatement, adults are the culturally preferred binary, the ones in control who create rules and insist that the rules are followed for the sake of logic, justice, and general order. Children are the binary under the control of adult authority and within adult systems, whose nature is supposed to be anarchic, perhaps good, but inherently in conflict with rules intending assimilation and obedience. These cultural perceptions are alternately (and often simultaneously) affirmed and problematized by Louis Sachar in Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Sideways Stories, written by an adult for children, and about both adults and children, is a book that breaks the rules over and over again. For a piece geared towards third to fifth graders, the conventions of a chapter book are subverted in the form, tone, and content, resulting in an exercise in literary experimentation. The experimentation throughout Sideways Stories from Wayside School results in a chaotic, fast-paced, funny, and sometimes unsettling children’s chapter book that deals with absurdity and the underlying truthfulness of the illogical and the irrational.

            Sideways Stories is a series of vignettes rather than a linear narrative. In fact, perhaps the most linear aspect of the book is the fact that new information is learned about characters as we go on. But this is also an experimental trait of the novel, since each chapter is about a different person, and several chapters function to reveal the very assumptions we make when we enter a narrative. It is interesting which reveals are new to only the reader, for instance, the fact that Nancy is a boy; his classmates know this and do not think his name is unusual, but our assumptions about genders and identity are put into question with the first sentence of Nancy’s chapter. Other information revealed in the story is new to both the diegetic characters and us as the readers, and odd mysteries are revealed and resolved within and outside of the story world simultaneously. A character referred to as Sammy is, in fact, a dead rat hidden under a pile of coats. Sammy’s ability to speak and the class’s ignorance of his true identity make this story preposterous. This is Sacar pointing out that stories and books themselves are a platform for experimentation and nonsense. Because the information is often incomplete in Sideways Stories, the book is unreliable, and so the reader must adjust his or her imagination accordingly. In doing so, the absurdity of the narrative construct itself is transparent. (Even the physicality of the medium is put into play; the reader must turn the book upside down to be able to read what John is saying when he stands on his head, since he can only read upside down.) The result of these subversions is that of surprise and humor, and perhaps a bit of mistrust.

            But at Wayside School, skepticism is warranted. The absurdity here is fluid. Sometimes the entire class is acting absurd. Sometimes only one person is. Sometimes only one person is outside of the absurdity. Adults can be the absurd players. Children can be the absurd players. Groups and systems are sometimes presented as illogical structures, while sometimes individuals are the problem. The variety of the absurdity and its iterations are endless, and the reactions to and results of surreal and illogical happenings are just as varied.