Tenderness
by Robert Cormier
List Price: $16.95
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0385322860
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Robert Cormier doesn't look like a man who writes novels of stunning impact
about the monstrous and inexorable power of evil. A slight man with wispy
gray hair and a crooked smile, his eyes gaze straight at you with kindly
frankness from behind his big glasses. He was for many years a newspaperman
specializing in human interest stories. Cormier and his wife Connie have
lived all their lives in the little New England mill town of Leominster,
Massachusetts, where he grew up as part of a close, warm community of
French Canadian immigrants. His four children and many grandchildren live
nearby and visit often.
Cormier's eleven novels for
young adults have won him the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American
Library Association, the ALAN Award from the National Council of Teachers
of English, the California Young Reader Medal, and many places on almost
every honor list in the field. His novel The Chocolate War is regarded
as the leading masterwork of adolescent literature. Cormier travels and
speaks extensively, and loves chocolate, the late night, and reading--especially
horror.
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You have referred to yourself as a "realistic writer". How important is it to you to convey a sense of reality when you are telling a story? I've always felt that you can have the greatest writing in the world and a terrific plot, but if your characters don't come alive, and if your reader doesn't either love them or hate them or just identify with them in some way, then everything else won't work. And so to get that sense of realism I try to create real characters and I think that's the key to my writing.
What or who inspired you to write your latest novel, Tenderness?
What got me started on Tenderness was something that has haunted me for years. Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, has in one of his books the line "To know the pain of too much tenderness" and this has always intrigued me because I like to go for the opposite side like in one of my earlier books, After the First Death. I wrote about innocence being monstrous, and the idea of tenderness carrying with it a certain amount of pain got me started thinking of the possibilities of that theme. I then went right to the characters and I came up with a girl who was searching for tenderness, a search which might be harmful. And also at the time I was reading about a lot of stuff in the paper in which these young offenders would be sent to a youth service place instead of a jail and they would be released at the age of 21, no matter what the crime was. And I use that old writers question "what if" a boy who committed a terrible crime was suddenly released innocently at 21 or 18 and what would happen if he met up with a girl like Lori in the book and the result was Tenderness.
Most of Tenderness is written from the point of view of Lori, a 15 year-old girl. Do you find it difficult writing from this perspective?
I don't find it difficult to write from the viewpoint of a female because I think there's parts of us that are masculine and feminine and we're responding all the time from that point of view. I think a writer should be able to write about old people, young people, from their view points even from different aspects of different ethnic groups. A writer, I think, has to be a complete individual as far as that goes and so I didn't have to make any big leap. I find though that the key to my character studies is that I have to be emotionally involved with them and I really fell in love with Lori. I thought she was terrific and a terrific person to explore and in the same way, I identified with Eric as well, which sometimes gives me chills when I think about it.
Why do you believe that some of your work has sparked controversy and do you foresee any debate concerning Tenderness?
There is a debate about all my books so I imagine Tenderness won't be any exception. And I think they're controversial because, going back to realism, they're realistic and a lot of people are made uncomfortable with realism. There is a tendency for all of us to want happy endings and to have the good guy win at the end and have the lovers stroll off into the sunset, particularly if they're teenage lovers. And I try to follow the sense of inevitability that I create in the books and so often my books upset people and if they upset people they become controversial but that's fine with me. I think the worst thing would be indifference. You know that old adage, "the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference." I'd hate to have anyone read one of my novels with a sense of indifference, so let them be controversial I suppose.
© Copyright 2009 by Robert Cormier. Reprinted with permission by Delacorte Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
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