Holes

I picked up Holes expecting a lean desert adventure and got a plot with three gears turning at once, and I did not notice for a while how well they were meshed. Louis Sachar published it with Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 20 August 1998, a 233-page novel for young readers that won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature that same year and the Newbery Medal in 1999. A film adaptation came out in 2003. The book earns those prizes on structure. There is a boy digging holes in a dried lake bed, a Latvian folktale about a broken promise, and a hundred-year-old Texas murder that everyone in the present has a reason to forget. Sachar cuts between them in short chapters, and the joins do not show until he wants them to.

Elya's Pig and a Curse with Paperwork

Stanley Yelnats IV belongs to a family that keeps a running joke about being cursed. The villain of family lore is Elya Yelnats, the no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather, and the curse has a documented origin. An old woman named Madame Zeroni gave Elya a pig, on the condition that once the pig was grown he would carry her up a mountain to drink from a stream and sing her a particular song. He meant to do it. He was distracted by a girl he wanted to marry, Myra Menke, and by his own stubbornness about timing, and rather than finish the task he left on a boat for America. The promise stays unkept. Whether Madame Zeroni cursed him or his own guilt did the work, the family has been paying ever since.

In America their luck is poor but survivable. Stanley's father is an inventor who has spent years trying to figure out a way to recycle old sneakers, a project that fills the apartment with a smell nobody wants to discuss. His mother insists there never was a curse and doubts the pig story altogether. Stanley, a heavy and gentle middle schooler, braces for bad luck the way other kids check the weather. When his bully Derrick Dunne drops his notebook in a toilet, Stanley is not surprised. When a pair of sneakers falls out of the sky and hits him on the head, he takes it as a sign.

Sneakers, a Judge's Anger, and Five-Foot Holes

What came off the overpass was a pair of Clyde "Sweet Feet" Livingston's signed baseball shoes, stolen from a display at a homeless shelter where they were due to be auctioned for more than five thousand dollars. Stanley was walking home with a wet notebook, got hit, picked them up, and ran because they stank and because the day had already gone badly enough. A patrol car stopped him. He told the court the truth, that the shoes fell from the sky, and nobody believed him. Livingston himself testified that he had donated those shoes to feed homeless children, and the judge called Stanley's crime despicable. He was sentenced to eighteen months at Camp Green Lake.

Camp Green Lake is a juvenile detention facility in the desert, on the site of a lake that has been dry for a hundred and ten years. The stated purpose of the camp is to build character. The method is digging. Each boy digs one hole a day, five feet wide and five feet deep, in ground so hard the shovel bounces and the boy's arms go numb. Mr. Sir runs morning lineup in a monotone and tells the boys they are not at Girl Scout camp. Mr. Pendanski holds group sessions that sound supportive and are not. The Warden appears rarely and rules completely: she scratches Mr. Sir across the face with a fingernail painted in rattlesnake venom, which is all the discipline anyone needs to see. The boys get four minutes of shower water, barely enough to drink, and no shoes.

Stanley joins a group that goes only by nicknames: X-Ray, Armpit, Squid, Zigzag, Magnet. He becomes Caveman. Anything interesting a boy turns up, a bone, a shard of glass, a bit of rock, buys a day off digging, and X-Ray, the smallest of them, runs the pecking order by deciding who finds what. So when Stanley uncovers half a lipstick tube engraved with the initials KB, he hands it over as camp politics require. The Warden's reaction tells him what he needs to know. She moves every hole to the area around X-Ray's find and keeps the boys working there for a week and a half. They are not building character. They are searching for something.

Green Lake, Sam, and Kissin' Kate Barlow

The lipstick tube pulls the reader back a century, into the second of Sachar's three timelines. Green Lake was once a real town, with peach trees and a one-room schoolhouse taught by Katherine Barlow, famous for her spiced peaches. She falls in love with Sam, a Black man who sells onions at the market and uses them for medicine. Charles "Trout" Walker, the richest man in town, has wanted her and cannot stand being refused. When the town sees Katherine and Sam kiss, Trout gathers a mob, the schoolhouse burns, and the sheriff, who has been making his own demands on Katherine all along, refuses to help her.

The town never recovers from that day. Rain stops, the lake shrinks to mud and then to nothing, the peach trees go, and the people who built their summers around the water pack up and leave. The Walker family stays on the land, generation after generation, waiting out the drought on property nobody wants. A hundred and ten years later the only structure still standing on that dry bed is a juvenile detention camp, and the woman running it inherited both the acreage and the grudge.

Sam and Katherine try to escape across the lake in Sam's rowboat. Trout comes after them in a motorboat, shoots Sam dead, and wrecks the boat. On the day Sam dies it rains. On every day after that, for a hundred and ten years, it does not. Katherine kills the sheriff three days later and turns outlaw, taking the name Kissin' Kate Barlow because she leaves a lipstick print on the cheek of every man she robs and kills. She works the West for twenty years. On one job she robs Stanley Yelnats I, the first of that name, while he travels from New York to California, and leaves him in the desert with nothing. He survives by dragging himself to a thumb-shaped mountain the family remembers as God's Thumb.

Trout Walker and his wife Linda, by then broke, try to force Kate to say where she buried the loot. She refuses. She dies laughing after a yellow-spotted lizard bites her, knowing they will dig forever and find nothing. The treasure stays in the ground, waiting for a hole dug by the wrong people for the wrong reason.

Zero, a Palindrome, and a Shovel in the Face

Back in the present, Stanley notices a boy nobody talks to. Zero sits apart, digs faster than anyone else, and cannot read. He is small, silent, and treated by every adult at the camp as if he were empty. Stanley, out of pity more than strategy, works out a trade: Zero digs part of Stanley's hole in the worst of the heat, and Stanley teaches him to read. The first lesson goes smoothly because Stanley Yelnats is a palindrome, and Zero can read the name perfectly well from either end. Small wins follow. Zero gets letters. Stanley gets help. Two boys who have spent the book unlucky in different ways start to look like friends.

Then it falls apart in a group session. Mr. Pendanski says something careless about Zero's inability to learn, the same assumption the whole camp runs on, and Zero smashes his face with a shovel and walks off into the desert. The Warden decides he must have died and orders his records destroyed so that no one comes asking questions. Stanley waits a few days, then follows him. Finding Zero is the stretch I liked least on a first read, because the playa goes on and on and very little happens for pages at a time. That slackness is honest, though. These are two starving boys with no water in a dry lake bed, and the slow crawl is the experience.

Carrying Zero Up God's Thumb

Stanley finds Zero alive under the wreck of a rowboat half buried in the sand, living on jars of peach preserves he calls sploosh. They finish the last jar and head for the thumb-shaped mountain, climbing because Stanley remembers his family's story about the man who survived up there. Zero collapses partway. Stanley, who has spent the whole book being shoved around by other people's decisions, puts Zero on his back and carries him the rest of the way. At the top there is water, and shade, and an onion field gone wild, Sam's old onions still growing after a century. They eat onions for a week.

Sitting up there, Stanley sings the lullaby his family has always sung, the same melody Madame Zeroni taught Elya, and neither boy knows why it feels important. Zero also admits the truth about the sneakers. He stole them from the shelter because he needed shoes, and when the fuss started he tossed them onto the roof of a passing car, where they flew off over an overpass and onto Stanley's head. Over a meal of raw onions the two boys trade the rest of their histories. Stanley talks about his family's curse. Zero talks about his mother, who disappeared from his life and whom he has looked for ever since, keeping her name close in the way other kids keep a photograph. Neither boy has had an adult bother with him for long, and the odd thing about the mountain is how ordinary they sound up there, two hungry kids comparing notes. Zero's real name is Hector Zeroni. The reader can do the arithmetic before the characters can. Hector is Madame Zeroni's great-great-great-grandson, so the boy Stanley just carried up the mountain is of the family Elya failed.

The Suitcase Labeled Stanley Yelnats

The two boys slip back into camp and dig at night in the hole where the lipstick tube turned up. The suitcase they pull out has a name stenciled on it. Before anyone can take it, the Warden, Mr. Sir, and Mr. Pendanski arrive with flashlights, then back away fast, because the hole is a nest of yellow-spotted lizards and the boys are covered in them. The lizards do not bite. A century ago Sam told rattlesnake hunters that people with onion in their blood are safe from lizard bites, and the boys smell like onions. The adults spend the night deciding how to explain two dead campers, and cannot get close.

At dawn a young lawyer named Ms. Morengo arrives with the state attorney general. Stanley's conviction has been overturned: Derrick Dunne placed him in the school bathroom at the time the shoes went missing, so the theft cannot have been his. The Warden tries to claim the suitcase. It is stenciled Stanley Yelnats, and no one in the camp answers to that name except the boy she has been working to death. Stanley refuses to leave without Hector, and since Hector's records were ordered destroyed, the lawyer takes him too. She mentions that Stanley's father has invented a peach-scented cure for foot odor, and she pretends not to hear when Zero says he stole the shoes. As the car pulls away, rain falls on Camp Green Lake for the first time in a hundred and ten years.

The coda is pure wish fulfillment and I do not mind it. The attorney general shuts the camp down, and the land sells and becomes a Girl Scout camp. The suitcase holds financial papers worth close to two million dollars, split between Stanley and Hector. Hector hires investigators and finds his mother, who later sits in the Yelnats kitchen and sings another verse of the lullaby. Stanley's father's invention gets a commercial with Clyde Livingston endorsing it. Everyone cruel is punished or ignored. Everyone kind is paid. There is one small moment before that which I remember better than the treasure. As Stanley leaves, Squid presses his mother's phone number into his hand and asks him to call and say that Alan is sorry, a request that lands harder than any of the book's big reversals, because it is the only time a camper gets to name himself and ask for something decent.

What the Book Will Not Do for You

Fair criticism first, because the ending is engineered. The plotting is coincidence stacked on coincidence: the shoes land on the exact boy who is sent to the exact camp where the exact ancestor's suitcase is buried, and the outlaw who buried it happens to have left a lipstick tube with her initials in the ground. Sachar builds backwards from the payoff, and it shows if you push on the joints. Each individual link is charming. The whole chain is load-bearing fiction.

The voice is tidy too. Chapters run short and stop on small hooks. Sachar reuses his best gags, so Mr. Sir's monotone and the Warden's polite little questions wear thin by the third act, and the jokes at the boys' expense repeat about a beat longer than they need to. The adults are types rather than people: Mr. Sir is a monotone, the Warden is a venomous socialite, Trout Walker is greed in boots. The camp boys get vivid nicknames and little interior life beyond X-Ray's turf and Armpit's temper. Anyone hoping for moral grayness, or a look at how juvenile facilities actually run, will find a fable instead. There is no scene in this book where a thoughtful person defends the system.

What you get instead is a book that makes its structure mean something. The three timelines are holes in the ground, and Sachar fills them one at a time, so that when the last layer opens the reader feels separate stories click into a single shape. Underneath sits a plain argument: a curse is only the story a family tells about its bad luck, and what breaks it is a boy doing the opposite of his ancestor, keeping a promise he never knew he had made. Aimed at middle grade readers, it also works on adults who let it. Readers who need a children's book that leaves a bruise should look elsewhere.