The Chocolate War, a young-adult novel by Robert Cormier published in 1974, has come to be regarded not only as a classic work of fiction but also as a litmus test of sorts for school librarians. Make the book available to students and you are a hero; fail to keep a copy on your shelves and you are a book-banning reactionary.

Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article by Brian Raftery that described Cormier’s most famous novel as “one of the country’s most challenged books.” It retold the story of a censorship battle that took place at Mowat Middle School in Panama City, Florida, in 1986. The confrontation between the school’s teachers (who liked the book and wanted it to be available to students) and various parents (who thought the book was inappropriate and wanted it removed from the school) became extremely heated and even led to an arson attempt on the home of a local reporter. But Raftery leaves unclear if the anti-Chocolate War forces wanted the book removed from the school entirely or if they simply wanted teachers to stop assigning it in class.

Here’s how Raftery describes the situation:

The fight had been ignited not by “The Chocolate War,” but by another Cormier novel: “I Am the Cheese,” his 1977 thriller about a troubled young man who can’t remember his past. When the parent of a Mowat seventh-grader objected to the book—citing its language and “morbid and depressing” tone—school officials immediately yanked it from classes, along with a few other titles, including “The Chocolate War” and Susan Beth Pfeffer’s “About David,” a 1980 novel about teen suicide.

It is not hard to see why many parents might not have wanted their middle-school children to be made to read The Chocolate War. Raftery reports that it upset some parents because of its “mild locker-room talk,” but the book actually includes a good deal of profanity. What’s more, the story contains no significant female characters—girls only exist in the novel as objects to be ogled by high-school boys admiring their breasts and tight jeans. At one point, Cormier writes, “Watching girls and devouring them with your eyes—rape by eyeball—was something you did automatically.” This type of “rape” occurs nearly every time the boys in the book are out in public.

The story of The Chocolate War is fairly simple. Trinity High School—an all-boys school located in a working-class neighbourhood of an unnamed US city—is presided over by a Catholic brotherhood, primarily the sadistic but cowardly Brother Leon, who may also be homosexual. Every year, the school raises money by encouraging the students to sell boxes of chocolates to relatives, friends, neighbours, and strangers. The protagonist is Jerry Renault, a fifteen-year-old freshman who refuses to sell any chocolates. Technically, participation in the fund-raising activity is voluntary, but Renault is the only student who has ever refused. Brother Leon has ordered 20,000 boxes of chocolate this year, which means that each of the school’s 400 pupils will have to sell fifty boxes if the fund-raiser is to be a success.

Leon approaches a pupil named Archie Costello who leads a secret group called Vigil. The group is banned on campus but its existence is an open secret, and Costello uses it to make trouble for Trinity students and teachers alike by playing one group off against the other. Archie Costello is not a violent person, but he uses his understanding of human weakness to get others to do what he wants by threatening to humiliate them in some way. In one notorious scene, he kicks in the door of a bathroom stall and points a camera at a student named Emile Janza he finds masturbating there so he can blackmail him.

As the fundraiser approaches, Brother Leon tells Costello to use Vigil to ensure that every boy sells fifty chocolate boxes. Costello agrees, but then orders Jerry Renault not to sell any chocolate for the first ten days of the fundraiser. Renault has a stubborn streak. His mother has just died of cancer and he is angry at the world. After the first ten days have elapsed, he continues to refuse to sell chocolates. This enrages Brother Leon, who orders Costello to make Renault cooperate, and things get out of hand.

The Chocolate War was published in 1974 and presumably takes place in that year. Jerry Renault is fifteen years old. In 1974, I was a fifteen-year-old student at Central Catholic High School, an all-boys school in Portland, Oregon. Our school held an annual candy sale to raise money, and we were made to sell a product called Almond Roca—an unappetising admixture of toffee, chocolate, and ground peanuts. I dreaded the days I was required to go door-to-door with this stuff and I rarely sold all of the boxes I was assigned. My father, a graduate of the same high school, usually ended up buying my unsold boxes, and for weeks afterwards, my mother would serve Almond Roca for dessert after dinner. To this day, I feel sick at the thought of it.

Probably no one has ever been better situated to appreciate The Chocolate War than I am. In 1974, I was already an avid reader but I didn’t get around to The Chocolate War until the late 1970s, after I had left high school. Alas, I didn’t like it much. I have a grudging admiration for it, but it certainly didn’t reflect my own experiences as a Catholic high-school student. The brothers who teach at Trinity are either bullies or ineffectual wimps. For the most part, the priests and nuns and laypeople who taught me in high school were decent human beings and good at their jobs.

The portrayal of the students isn’t much more optimistic. With the lone exception of Jerry Renault, the young boys in The Chocolate War are cowardly, cruel, stupid, easily coerced, or some combination of these traits. The student body of my high school included plenty of upstanding and decent human beings, many of whom have gone on to become pillars of their community, good fathers and husbands, and doctors and lawyers and teachers and so forth. Even the worst of my classmates didn’t strike me as evil or sadistic, and if any of my old classmates grew up to become a real-life villain, I haven’t heard about it.

Jerry Renault aspires to be a quarterback on the Trinity football team. I served as the equipment manager on my high school’s varsity football team for four years. When I was a freshman, our team’s best football player was a senior named Fred Quillan who was always kind to me and went on to win two Super Bowl titles with the San Francisco 49ers in 1981 and 1984. But his post-football life went haywire, and he died in 2016, at the age of 60, after years of battling depression and alcoholism. Quillan’s life and career illustrated a wide variety of human experience, but not one of the characters in The Chocolate War has any comparable depth. They can each be summarised with a single word—bully, coward, follower, leader, brainiac, idiot, and so forth.

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The story is bleak and the ending is even bleaker—Cormier at least had the courage of his convictions. The novel ends with a boxing match between Jerry Renault and Emile Janza (who has been forced to participate lest the photograph of him masturbating—which does not in fact exist—be made public). The set-up of this match is convoluted and ridiculous. The students have each written down the name of one of the two fighters and a boxing manoeuvre—for example, “Janza, Right to Jaw”—and these are then drawn at random by an emcee and read aloud. If the note says “Janza, Right to Jaw,” Renault has to stand there while Janza smashes him in the jaw.

When one fighter is incapacitated or resigns, the student whose written instruction was the last to be read out will win Renault’s fifty unsold boxes of chocolate. I can’t imagine anyone—even a dumbly obedient high-school boy—standing there and letting himself be hit in the face without putting up a defence. It certainly seems out of character for Jerry Renault, the only character in the book with any spine, to agree to this charade. After his weeks-long refusal to participate in a fairly painless fundraiser, why would he take part in something as nonsensical as Cormier’s ludicrous boxing match?

For years, people who have objected to the novel have been pilloried as censorious prudes. But I’m fairly certain that, in the 1970s, the powers-that-be at my high school would never have shelved a book like The Chocolate War in its library. They certainly wouldn’t have assigned it to the students. In 1987, Cormier said of his critics, “The fundamentalists are certainly rolling in high gear, and it gives me chills.” Like that quote, Cormier’s prose in The Chocolate War is often clichéd (“the sky was the limit,” he felt “lighter than air,” etc.) or ungrammatical (“Caroni had felt badly for Jerry Renault”)—he was a journalist for years and his writing rarely rises above that of a newspaper article. What’s more, the book’s cultural references are unlikely to resonate with young readers unfamiliar with Jimmy Cagney or Sammy Davis (Cormier omits the “Jr.”) and other once-famous entertainers.

Cormier’s insights into human nature aren’t especially perceptive either. At one point, Archie Costello orders Emile Janza to harass Jerry Renault by calling him a “fairy,” and Renault responds violently to this provocation. Later, Janza asks Costello if Renault really is a homosexual and Costello replies, “Of course not. That’s why he blew up. If you want to get under a guy’s skin accuse him of being something he isn’t. Otherwise you’re only telling him something he knows.” This gets human psychology exactly backwards. Most of us will react more strongly to an insult we suspect is true than to one we know to be false. In my high-school days, “fag” was employed as an all-purpose term of derision. Few students reacted because, presumably, very few of them were actually gay. Call a man who is six-and-a-half-feet tall “shorty” and he’s likely to laugh at you. Call a man who is five-and-a-half-feet tall “shorty” and he’s likely to punch you in the nose (if he can reach it).

Although the book shows Catholic teachers and pupils alike in a very unflattering light, I don’t believe that Cormier was anti-Catholic. He was raised a Catholic and was a columnist for a Catholic newspaper for many years. Nevertheless, I can certainly understand why a Catholic parent might not want their middle-school child to be assigned his book. If the book were set in a high school where virtually every teacher and student was black and all but one of them were spineless or venal, I can imagine many black parents objecting, and those in the liberal media who routinely defend The Chocolate War would probably support those objections.

The Chocolate War would probably have passed into obscurity long ago had it not become a cause célèbre in America’s ongoing culture wars. Minus its raw language and references to masturbation and young girls’ breasts, the book isn’t all that objectionable. But it also isn’t the brilliant piece of literature that its defenders have to pretend it is in order to keep fighting for its inclusion in the young-adult literary canon. I would strongly object to anyone trying to have the book dropped by its publisher or pulled from bookstore shelves, but I also don’t believe that every school library in America should have to be furnished with a copy. School libraries tend to be small and shelf space in them is often scarce. Why should they be required to make space for a mediocre novel written by someone born 99 years ago that has little to say to contemporary young Americans?

In a 1998 letter to one of the novel’s critics, Cormier (who died in 2000 at the age of 75) wrote: “Yes, there is language in the book that reflects how some young people really talk, and there are references to sex.” Those who champion the book claim that Cormier was making a brave choice by filling his book with the language that schoolboys of the 1970s actually used. But that isn’t really true. Were Cormier’s book to actually represent the language heard in an all-boys Catholic school of the 1970s, it would be far more profane and include a number of racial slurs. Cormier admitted as much. Later in the letter, he tells his correspondent, “As to language, the words used in the book are mild compared to what one hears in any school corridor or school bus these days.” In other words, Cormier deliberately used a degree of profanity acceptable to liberal sensibilities that would nonetheless antagonise conservative Catholics. It was a stroke of genius, in a way, because it is unlikely that contemporary liberals would bother to defend something so white, male, and straight otherwise.

My freshman English teacher in high school was Fred Quillan’s mother. She was one of the people who helped instil in me a love of language and literature. Because of teachers like Mrs Quillan, I learned to feel strongly about books, and I learned to stand up for my opinions about them and not kowtow to the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom says that The Chocolate War is a bona fide classic of American young-adult fiction. If I had to give it a grade, it would be a C+. But thanks to its smuttier aspects and its anti-Catholic leanings, I suspect the war over The Chocolate War will go on and on.