One hesitates to speculate on what the theme of the next book for the pre-adolescent market will be for a writer whose muse seems to be Haim Ginott rather than Calliope. One can be assured, however, that it will mirror what people have been talking about lately in Darien and Short Hills and San Fernando, that it will be rendered with a cheerful, reassuring suburban sameness, and that it will have the same relationship to a truly significant exploration of social problems that a Stanley Kramer film does.

It's no secret that kids like Blume books … but it's doubtful that the novelty of her themes alone is responsible for her popularity. After all, this kind of "realism" has become the cliched substance of Norman Lear situation comedies, and Judy Blume's books are really old-fashioned by comparision with, say, Norma Klein. In spite of the many, tiresome allusions to Bloomingdale's, these are not really trendy books and the values they promote are very much those of mainstream, Middle America.

Nor does it seem that Blume's books, or any other "problem" novels, ought to be discussed and evaluated on the basis of what they teach children about handling specific social or personal problems…. Their success depends on the author's handling of narrative techniques and their meaning and educative value is embedded in those same techniques. To discover the key to Blume's popularity, one has to look beyond the realistic trappings and didactic intentions of the "problem" book to a closer study of why her narrative techniques work especially well with children. To understand what her books really teach children, one has to understand the way in which these techniques are used to communicate a style of experiencing and perceiving the self and the world and a definition of what it means to be a pre-adolescent child in suburban America.

As is often the case with popular fiction, Blume's books are successful for what they are not as much as for what they are. That is, her books are not very demanding and they make for the kind of easy, rapid reading that children like to relax with. Since all her books are told through the voice of a child narrator, the vocabulary is necessarily limited and the sentence construction basic and repetitious.

Her plots are loose and episodic: they accumulate rather than develop. They are not complicated or demanding and the pace is sometimes sloppy, as in Blubber, where Jill's change of heart seems too sudden and contrived. She has a repertoire of stock minor characters—the annoying older or younger sibling, the steadfast friend—who can be counted on as plot machinery or for comic effects. In the tradition of children's books, parents are kept harmlessly out of the way. And in the vein of recent American children's books, these parents are usually well-meaning but ineffectual characters whose efforts at communication are often comic failures.

On the other hand, Judy Blume is a careful observer of the everyday details of children's lives and she has a feel for the little power struggles and shifting alliances of their social relationships. She knows that children can be cruel to one another and that they are deeply concerned with peer group judgments. She can be funny in a broad, slapstick way, as in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, but her humor is more often based on regarding her characters with cloying adult irony. (pp. 72-3)

Blume's most characteristic technique and the key to her success is the first-person narrative: through this technique she succeeds in establishing intimacy and identification between character and audience. All her books read like diaries or journals and the reader is drawn in by the narrator's self-revelations. Creating the illusion that one is having an intimate conversation with a close friend, the first-person narrative succeeds especially in children's books because children enter so readily into a partnership with fictional narrators and because they tend to experience books as extensions of other types of personal relationships. (p. 74)

What strikes one immediately about Blume's narrators is the sameness of voice…. Essentially the same voice speaks to the reader in Deenie and Margaret, in all of Blume's books, in fact, and the effect of this sameness on the child reader is probably reassuring, like discovering an old friend in a new neighborhood.

Blume's choice of first person narrative and her didactic intentions make it imperative that her characters be perceptive and self-conscious and that they continually draw conclusions from their experience…. Blume's narrators are always cogitating, earnestly trying to be honest to their own feelings and to discover meaning and truth in the world: one has the sense that they will grow up to be characters in a John Fowles novel.

None of this can be taken very seriously as an accurate description of the mental processes of pre-adolescent children: kids of this age are beginning to become self-aware but this is too formulated, too pat, and thought crystallizes too readily into truism to be convincing. What seems important to note here, however, is that self-consciousness is offered as a model for children to identify with and that self-awareness and the awareness of other people's feelings are presented as goals in themselves.

Self-consciousness and self-awareness, however, can turn rapidly into self-absorption. Blume's books are remarkable in the number of narcissistic incidents they portray: Margaret examining herself in a mirror, Tony's masturbation, and so on. The pattern of such incidents suggests that they are fundamental to Blume's conception of the pre-adolescent child's nature.

One of the disturbing results of this preoccupation with the self is the loss of tangible intimacy with any concrete thing or object: the texture of lives lived in a specific, particular place is missing. Although the geography of the world of Blume's books is rather limited—Jersey City, Radnor, the urban or suburban Northeast—these places exist only as proper nouns, generalized abstractions. For all the reader knows about the sights and sounds and smells of these places, they might as well be Omaha or Anaheim. To put it another way, Blume makes Any Place into No Place, a talent which should not be confused with that of, say, E. B. White, who can turn Any Place into Every Place, an idealized but vividly realized setting. (pp. 74-6)

In the end … Judy Blume's books are impoverished because she fails to establish a vital relationship between place and character. She creates no place for her characters to inhabit except the self, and more importantly, no world for her readers to live in. Things are not encountered by her characters; they are understood through intellection and rationalization.

In traditional children's literature, characters went out into the world, encountered it on non-subjective terms, and came to self-awareness in situations and through social actions which were meaningful in themselves. In Blume's novels, the quest turns inward, self-awareness becomes a goal and not a product, and actions are valuable only in so far as they authenticate the feelings of the narrators. This may be good training for life in narcissistic, self-absorbed, suburban America but, in the long run, it is poor nourishment for the imagination of children. (p. 76)