I absolutely worshipped this book as a kid, perhaps because kids take the broad point of view and are willing to see, much more than adults, that life is basically a horrible rat race and most everyone falls into its trap at the end. What some have seen as the cynicism of the book kids see as a virtue, and what made this book special in 1974 (the era of Watergate) was that Cormier stood pretty much alone in his absolute negativity, while everyone else, from your school counselors on up, were encouraging you to look on the bright side always. Today, perhaps, the bright side isn't strictly enforced the way it once was. A general aura of gloom and doom prevails, in everything from TV to the news to comic books and social media. The increase in school shootings have given kids another reason to be afraid of their peers, but in 1974 we went to school, saw the evil, and couldn't see it reflected anywhere else but in The Chocolate War.
It was enough to put me off chocolate, and anyone who knows me knows I love the stuff! We raised money at our high school (another Catholic boys school) to help the legal defenses of one of our own who was unjustly imprisoned for smuggling drugs across international borders. In this book, Jerry Renault stands alone against a tide of evil greater than any ever amassed in history, and several have read the book as an allegory for the conquering wave of Hitler and the Nazi party across Europe in the 1930s, while Brother Leon and Archie Costello stand in for Hitler and Mussolini. The book's title has these echoes, and also those of the Vietnam War, still raging while Cormier labored on his novel. Others have contrasted the world of Archie (the "Assigner" of Trinity's secret society, the "Vigils," with the world of Archie and Jughead at Riverdale High, and suggesting that maybe private school, for all its cachet, isn't as good an education as the one meted out by Principal Weatherbee and Miss Grundy.
The Chocolate War is also thick with sexuality and violence. Some of its action was taken by Cormier from the existing school classics To Sir with Love and The Blackboard Jungle (for example, the famous "destruction of room 19"" in The Chocolate War has its beginnings back in To Sir with Love, when the teacher on his first day of school leans on his desk and finds it collapsing sunder his touch) and those books had dark elements, but in none of them was a student photographed whacking off in the boys room and blackmailed about it, the linchpin of the action in the Cormier book. Jerry starts throwing up in his mouth when assailed as a "fairy" by Emile, ironically enough one who finds himself getting aroused when wrestling or tackling an opponent. Everyone's sort of dissociated from his feelings. Adolescence is a time to flex one's mental and physical muscles and there's a lot of flexing going on, and it never stops being grim. Maybe the book might have improved had there been one little ray of light, if only for contrast's sake, so if someone asked me for a good book to read about a private boys' school I might suggest instead the superlative A GOOD SCHOOL by Richard Yates, but this one isn't to be sneered at, even its silly parts.
L
Kevin Killian