Archie always believed in doing the smart thing. Not the thing that you ached to do, not the impulsive act, but the thing that would pay off later.

How did I feel about Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War five years after reading it for the first time?

Much, much differently.

But I say that as a matter of my only real opinion last time was that this book wasn’t as controversial as I’d once suspected and that I didn’t like the way the boys in the book thought about girls. And now, with a few years of reading YA under my belt and a few years of actually working with teens, I think I went in with different expectations. I also got to leave the book with different reactions, too.

When Jerry is tapped to become part of The Vigils, a secret/not-so-secret society of sorts on the campus of his all-boys private school, he’s given the initiation challenge of refusing to take part in the annual fundraising chocolate sale. He has ten days to say no when his name is called and he’s expected to talk about how many boxes he has sold.

But when day eleven and twelve roll around, Jerry continues to say no. He continues to not participate.

Not only does this get everyone in his class riled up — it’s an act of defiance for the long-held Trinity tradition — but Jerry’s refusal to take part in the sale also defies the Vigils. He shouldn’t be messing with the school and his peers, let alone the Vigils.

But Archie, who isn’t president of the Vigils but who takes the lead in figuring out who to recruit and what it is the recruits will have to do to prove they’re worthy of the group, handles this calmly. Even though he’s agreed to have the Vigils make this the best sale year ever (it’s a favor to Brother Leon, who asks for the favor), Archie isn’t going to act immediately. Yes, Jerry needs to do his part in the chocolate sale. It’s important. It reflects on the Vigils. But for Archie, the easy way out would be for him to beat on Jerry. The easy way out would be to corner Jerry, intimidate him, and make him follow the rules.

Archie waits. And plots.

Jerry, meanwhile, becomes the target of bullying. Yes, he’s beat up, but the real torment comes in less physically-aggressive means. He’s laughed at. He’s prank called over and over. These are little things, and while Jerry continues to stand up for not wanting to take part in the chocolate sale, they do start to get to him mentally. It comes out in little ways — he feels bad that his father, for example, knows about the phone calls. When he summons the energy to call the one girl he’s been eyeing, he doesn’t have the strength to actually talk to her for fear of what she might say. It comes out, too, through Goober, who decides that he’s going to take a stand with Jerry. And even though Goober is much more open about his feelings, and he’s tried to convince Jerry to get on board selling, he still supports Jerry’s decision making. Jerry’s impacted because he feels weird. He doesn’t feel sad about not participating. He doesn’t feel guilty for it nor guilty for how Goober’s reacting. He just feels weird.

Maybe that weirdness is empowerment. It’s taking the stand for what it is he does and does not want to do.

So now we have Archie, who is plotting to do something big to get back at Jerry, and we have Jerry, who continues to say no to selling the chocolate. We also have a handful of other male characters but for me, they weren’t as interesting as these two. And I think what made these two so interesting to me was not just the power dynamics — they both want to prove themselves — but how representative they were of the school as a whole. So Brother Leon wants to have the most outstanding chocolate sale this year because he wants to prove his own leadership capabilities. He’s second in command at Trinity, but with the head of the school unable to participate, this is Leon’s chance to prove his worth. Which is precisely Archie’s position, too. He’s second in command of the Vigils. If he can pull of the chocolate war and bring a good image to the Vigils, he can prove his worth too.

Except unlike Leon, who is a begger and wants things done quickly, Archie is a much more precise and deliberate thinker. Their methods of wielding the power they have and reaching for the control they want are so different.

Archie’s plans to take the chocolate sales to the next level comes through in his initially-stated philosophy: he’d do the thing that paid off most, rather than the thing that he ached to do. Jerry did the thing he ached to do. He disturbed the universe by not selling the chocolate and by defying his test by the Vigils. He wanted to be his own person and act according to his own wants and desires. Archie, on the other hand, may have wanted to skip out on selling chocolate or helping Brother Leon. He may have wanted to slug Jerry and have that immediate gratification. But he knew the true pay off would come through making a smart choice, rather than the one he really wanted to make.

That smart choice was putting Jerry in a physical battle with Janza, another member of the Vigils who is trying to prove himself. Who had been part of the crew trying to take down Jerry in the first place as a means of proving the power of the Vigils as a whole. And while Archie tricks Jerry into showing up to the fight, Archie also knows Jerry won’t back down from it because that’s just the kind of person Jerry is. He’s going to see things through to the end. Janza was a no brainer, though, as a boy who wanted to prove himself and as someone who would love nothing more than to annihilate Jerry. And through selling chocolate bars and the opportunity to call the shots to be made by each of the boys in the ring, Archie made the money for the sales.

He also set up the entire event so that it’d be broken up by authority and he’d be in good with the Brothers still.

What captured my attention in The Chocolate War this time was less the plot and much more the characters and what their goals were. I wanted to know what the stakes were. I wanted to see what drove them to behave how they did. The ultimate take away is bleak — even if you stand up for what you believe in, even if it’s something that hurts no one else, like Jerry did, you will face the consequences of authority and the establishment. We get this early in the story with the role playing scenario in Brother Leon’s class with Bailey, and we get it in the end with Jerry being bruised and broken following the fight.

Jerry doesn’t walk away a hero in the story. If there’s a hero at all to this story — and let’s take “hero” as a stretch here, defined as someone who got what they were going for the whole time — it’s Archie. He learned his opponents’ weaknesses, then he took advantage of them to further himself. And even if Brother Leon is considered a hero too — he did manage to make the highest grossing, most successful chocolate sale in the history of Trinity — he’s still overshadowed by Archie and the Vigils. It’s Archie himself who says at the very beginning of the novel what might be one of the biggest truths of the book: “Most grown-ups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.”

Archie found that vulnerability in Leon and ran with it.

Even if Jerry learns the hard truth that standing up for what you believe in leaves you open to invasion, to attack, to unrelenting scrutiny, it is hard as a reader not to love him for what he does. And I think because he’s strong in his convictions and a target because of this, it makes the messages and truths he learns even more difficult to take. How come a nice guy, one who is harming no one ends up the victim?

I loved how uncomfortable this book made me this time around.

Is it controversial? Maybe. Thinking about my initial reactions and thinking about the experiences I’ve had in the last five years through reading YA and working with teens, I think my perceptions of controversy have changed. I think my initial reading was about the things which could trigger heated debate, rather than my reading now, which considered the controversial elements of the story to be those very hard to digest truths about character, about power, about motivation, and about being true to yourself in a world which wants you to crumble and conform. Those are huge ideas. Those are not easy things to think about or read about. Part of it is because in the context of the book, those who are hurt hardest are the characters who are doing the least harm. But I think a bigger part of it is that these are the things we deal with every single day as living, breathing, working, thinking people. The systems we fight against do hold us down and do force us to conform. It’s not necessarily with fists and kicks, though. It’s much more subtle and much more psychologically debilitating than we want to give it credit for. Not to mention it’s also about peer pressure.

I’m still not a fan of how women were represented in the book. But it makes sense, too. This is an all-boys school, so of course there aren’t many females around. And it makes sense that the boys in this story would think about girls in very sexualized ways — they’re stuck in an all-male system, and it’s through their imagination that they can find some way to get rid of that frustration. Plus, they are teen boys and they are hormonal. I give Cormier huge kudos for being open about this and for putting his characters in those positions, especially when they’re compromising. Part of why Janza relents to Archie is his fear that Archie has a photo of him in a precarious position. And what’s interesting is that it’s Janza earlier on who says this: “People had a fear of being embarrassed or humiliated, of being singled out for special attention.” And here, that’s exactly why he’s willing to bow to Archie’s power.

But back to the women in the book — we have a dead mom and we have the girls near the bus stop. Jerry tries calling one of them, but that’s all we have of ladies in the book. Jerry, in fact, considers his crush’s body as an object of desire when masturbating, too. And yes, the line about one of the boys raping the girls with his eyes still bothers me a lot, but taking it in the context of the story, in context of male hormones and testosterone flowing, I get it.

Considering this book published in 1974, I applaud Cormier’s honesty in not just his big messages, but in his ability to be open about sex, about masturbation, and about the ways that teen boys think about women and girls. It’s not always pretty. But more than that, I think this book stands out among even recent titles in terms of being unflinching in honesty about these topics. We all like to think that teen boys are saints without urges and inappropriate thoughts but it’s also important to remember they’re teen boys.

I could say a lot more about this book in the context of bullying, too, but the important parts to me were that the bullying here was at times physical — which is how we associate boys and bullying — but so much more was psychological and subtle — which is how we associate girls and bullying. Cormier makes it clear that being nasty doesn’t have a gendered approach.

I’m unable to get to the movie or the sequel to The Chocolate War before this week is up, but I’m almost glad. This reading experience was really worthwhile and opened my eyes a lot not only in terms of the book, but it opened my mind up to seeing and understanding how much I have grown as a reader. It’ll be fascinating to revisit this book in another five years and see what stands out, too.

Reviewed from a purchased copy.