What Roald Dahl Knows That Adult Novelists Don't

Every time I come home from book club, I feel the same thing. Like I've been chewing hard but swallowed nothing. Last month our group read a literary novel that had gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. The protagonist's inner life was laid out in dense, careful detail, the prose was beautiful, and the whole book quietly insisted on the weight of its emotions. But as I slipped it into my bag after the meeting, I had one thought: this writer doesn't trust the reader.

That same week I was reading Roald Dahl's Matilda with a group of third-graders. When we got to the scene where Miss Trunchbull first appears, I watched their faces. That expression — laughing while their shoulders drew in just slightly. Reacting to something dangerous and ridiculous and too real. In that moment I understood again what Dahl is doing. He respects children as readers. He doesn't try to teach them how an emotion is supposed to feel; he just takes them straight into it.

Dahl Doesn't Explain

The thing that bothers me most when I read adult fiction is the habit of labeling emotions. When the protagonist is sad, the novelist analyzes what kind of sadness it is, what wound from childhood gave rise to it, how that sadness shapes his present — across several paragraphs. As a reader I follow along and feel myself growing more distant. Because I'm not experiencing the emotion; I'm being handed a report on it.

Dahl doesn't do that. Think of the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie Bucket receives a chocolate bar. Dahl doesn't lecture the reader about how desperate Charlie's poverty is, or how long the boy has longed for chocolate. He simply shows Charlie eating the chocolate bar — very slowly, a tiny bit at a time. That's enough. In fact, it's the only way it could work.

I see similar mistakes in the classroom fairly often. Teachers — myself included — sometimes feel the urge to add explanation to make children feel something. The moment you ask, "This scene is really sad, isn't it?" the children start checking what they're supposed to be feeling. Dahl's text almost never steers like that. He spreads the scene out and waits for the reader to walk into it.

Why Do Adults Forget This

One of my book club friends teaches literature, and she once said: "Good adult fiction should make the reader uncomfortable." I understand that. Discomfort can be a condition of good art. But the discomfort I most often encounter isn't that kind. It's the discomfort that comes from a writer not trusting my emotions. The fatigue that comes from sentences written on the premise that I won't be able to make the connections myself.

Adults tend to come off badly in Dahl's books. This is partly his personal contrariness, but it's also a kind of declaration of trust in his young readers. Children already experience adult power in their own lives. By working that into fantasy and twisting it, Dahl is essentially telling them: "I know. And you're right that it's strange." He never says this directly. Miss Trunchbull's behavior says it for him. That, to me, is what literary respect looks like.

I encounter this far less often in adult fiction. There is too much telling the reader what they already know, spelling out what they could already feel. And sometimes it gets packaged as sophistication — layered metaphors, self-referential structure, narrative instability. I enjoy those things sometimes. But when they become decoration that conceals a distrust of the reader, I'm just tired.

Sensory Specificity Is What Creates Emotion

Another thing Dahl does brilliantly is sensation. He writes smells, textures, and sounds with extraordinary precision. Reading the first description of the inside of the peach in James and the Giant Peach, you can almost smell the sweet juice. What matters is that the description isn't a pile of adjectives stacked on top of each other. Dahl chooses one thing. And that one thing does the work.

I think this says something about teaching as well. When I'm teaching children, the moments that land best aren't when I'm explaining an abstract concept — they're when I bring in something concrete, a real object or a real moment. Last week, for a lesson on observational writing, I brought in a stone from my desk. A flat, grayish rock I'd picked up from Wissahickon Creek. The writing the children produced after holding it in their hands was better than anything a lesson on "what good observation looks like" could have achieved.

Dahl writes the way that stone works. He doesn't teach the theory of emotion — he puts the object that emotion clings to right in your hand.

Among the adult novels I've reread recently, there are writers who work this way too. But they tend to get labeled minimalist or cold, and they often just miss the shortlist for the major literary prizes. I still feel there's a tendency in literary criticism to treat overexplanation and complex interior narration as evidence of depth. I'm skeptical of that.

Sadness That Doesn't Lean on Sentiment

Dahl's books are often cruel. They feature children who are threatened by adults, lonely, poor. But he never lets the situation slide into melodrama. Charlie is not portrayed as pitiable. Matilda is not written as a victim. They move under their own power within their circumstances. And that agency is exactly what makes readers genuinely root for them. Not out of pity, but out of solidarity.

I think this is an extraordinarily difficult thing to pull off. In adult fiction I often find myself worried about the protagonist because they seem so unfortunate — and that worry gets packaged as being moved. But it makes me a spectator, not a reader. In front of Dahl's children, I don't become a spectator. I take the child's side. From the very first page, without any explanation.

This connects to what I believe emotional truth actually is. Emotional truth is not describing an emotion accurately — it's making the reader touch that emotion directly. Dahl knows this. And the fact that he knows it is what carries his books beyond the territory of children's literature.

On the way home from book club, I thought about this month's novel. It was a good book — serious, ambitious, beautifully written. But I never took anyone's side in it. That difference is everything.