Summary
Narrated in the present tense by an unnamed omniscient narrator, Loser opens with the narrator addressing the reader as “you.” The narrator says that you grow up with the novel’s protagonist. You never notice him because he blends into the scenery of the playground and neighborhood. You are neither friends nor enemies with him. You may catch a glimpse of him sledding down Halftank Hill with his arms out, screaming his head off. You may be annoyed that he is having more fun. But you don’t think much about him, and don’t even know his name. Then one day, someone says Zinkoff, and you somehow know who the name belongs to.
The narrator comments that Zinkoff is one of many boys from the working-class town in which the story is set. After years of being fenced in by his backyard and his mother’s voice, Zinkoff stands on his front steps in the morning sun. He is old enough now, at the age of six, that there are no more limits or parents to watch over him. He steps down and runs. He cannot believe how free he is. He races a white car and looks around for someone to celebrate with. Seeing no one, he laughs and celebrates with himself. He turns at the end of the block, and it occurs to him that if he keeps turning he can run forever.
Referring to the other children as pups, the narrator explains how the neighborhood children, also let loose by their parents, run free like puppies. They converge on the street and decide to race down the alleys. They race in summer and winter, in rain and snow. They discover that they like winning more than losing. In fact they love winning, and they invent different challenges for themselves to compete in. Who can eat the most cupcakes? Who can burp the loudest? Who can grow tallest? There are winners everywhere, in the backyards, alleys, and playgrounds. But Zinkoff never wins. He doesn’t notice that he doesn’t win, and neither do the other pups. Not yet.
On his first day of first grade, Zinkoff gets in trouble—with his mother. Although she intends to walk him to school, Zinkoff is too eager to leave. He hates to wait. She rushes downstairs to see he has already left. On the street, she sees him among the other children, who are walking with their parents. He wears a giraffe hat his father bought at the zoo. School is only three blocks away, so she knows he will get there before she can catch him. With a sigh of surrender, she goes back into the house.
Miss Meeks, the first-grade teacher, watches the boy in the giraffe hat walk straight to a front-row desk and take a seat. Other students giggle at him. Miss Meeks wonders if he is going to be a problem. It is her retirement year, and the last thing she needs is a troublesome student. She comments on the lifelikeness of the hat. Zinkoff pops to his feet and beams at her. She says she’s afraid he’ll have to take it off in the classroom. He cheerfully agrees and removes the hat, sitting back down. She finds him agreeable enough. She takes the hat to the cubbyholes, then realizes she doesn’t know his name. When asked, Zinkoff shouts his last name boldly. She has never known a student to announce himself in such a way. The other students laugh. She stuffs the giraffe hat in his cubbyhole, which makes the cubbyhole stand out from the others. She thinks that Donald Zinkoff, in more ways than cubbyholes, will always be easy to find.
Miss Meeks welcomes the class to their first day at John W. Satterfield Elementary School. She says it is the first day of twelve school years, and at the end, each of them will have graduated high school. She speaks of how they will be adults by then, ready to begin their lives and start families. She picks up a piece of chalk and writes an equation on the green slate chalkboard to show how many days it will be until they finish school: 180 school days multiplied by 12 years equals 2160 days. She says that is how long their journey will last, and each day will be an opportunity to learn something new, to become whatever they want to become. She pulls a navy blue train conductor’s cap from her desk and puts it on. She asks who is coming aboard the learning train. All the students raise their hands, apart from Zinkoff, who jumps to his feet so fast he knocks the desk over. He thrusts his hands into the air and bellows “Yahoo!”
The first lesson is how to write one’s name. Zinkoff has already learned his letters, at least some of them. But he has never traced his name through paper before. He feels a thrill as he moves his pencil across the page. To see his name on the page is like being born again. He happily shows the teacher, who can’t make out what the pencil lines say; they are like the playpen doodling of a two-year-old. She encourages him to try again on the other side of the page, but it makes no difference. His penmanship is sloppy—possibly a sign of poor motor skills. She hopes, for Zinkoff’s sake, that he is simply sloppy.
At recess, some older boys take Zinkoff’s giraffe hat and pass it around. Zinkoff laughs, enjoying the spectacle of the hat bobbing around so much that he forgets the hat it is his. Eventually a fourth-grader takes the hat and sticks his hand in it, using the giraffe’s head as a puppet. Everybody laughs. He asks who the hat belongs to and Zinkoff runs forward, tripping on his feet and falling on his face. Everyone laughs again, and Zinkoff laughs too. Zinkoff says the hat is his, but the older boy shakes his head, saying the hat is his. Zinkoff is confused, but assumes the boy must have left it at the zoo and it somehow came into Zinkoff’s possession. Zinkoff is sad to have lost the hat, but he is happy the boy has got his hat back. He cheerfully accepts what the older boy says. However, the boy is angry because he had meant to make Zinkoff upset. Unwittingly, Zinkoff cheated him out of his fun. The older boy pokes Zinkoff in the forehead with one of the giraffe’s horns and then throws the hat on the ground, stepping on it.
On the way home, Zinkoff reports back to his mother, saying he loves his teacher. His mother gives him a silver star sticker from the bag she always keeps with her. She wears the giraffe hat home, making Zinkoff clap with excitement. At home, Zinkoff sits on the front steps waiting for his father, who is a mailman. He listens for the busted sounds of his father’s cheap clunker of a car. He spends the evening telling his parents about his first day. Before sleep, Zinkoff tells God and the stars about his day. He believes that the stars his mother gives him are stars that have fallen from the sky that she has put in the freezer to cool down.
Analysis
The opening chapters of Loser establish the theme of difference. Unlike the novel’s subsequent chapters, which mostly follow Zinkoff’s point of view, the first chapter is narrated in the second person, addressing the reader as “you.” With this formal decision, Spinelli positions the reader as one of Zinkoff’s neighbors or classmates, who see Zinkoff as an ambient presence: someone who is occasionally noteworthy for his awkwardness but who the majority of the time recedes into the background. In this way, Spinelli implicitly associates Zinkoff with an outsider the reader may know—or be vaguely aware of—in their own life.
Having established Zinkoff as a marginal figure in his town, the narrator moves closer to Zinkoff’s perspective. Although the narrator initially describes Zinkoff as being like all the other boys who are excited to roam their neighborhood without their parents watching over them, Zinkoff’s difference becomes apparent when the boys start racing each other and competing in various games. Unlike the others, Zinkoff never wins. However, he is young enough that he doesn’t notice, and nor do the others. However, the narrator hints that Zinkoff’s difference will prove to be a problem for him, foreshadowing conflict to come with the simple line: “Not yet.”
Miss Meeks’s first-grade teacher notices Zinkoff’s difference immediately when he walks in with his giraffe hat. She is guarded around Zinkoff, worrying that he will be a troublemaker. However, in an instance of situational irony, Miss Meeks’s expectations are undermined when Zinkoff is agreeable and kind. However, she still harbors judgment against Zinkoff, seeing the way his giraffe hat sticks out of his cubbyhole as a symbol for the way Zinkoff will stand out in life.
Zinkoff’s difference and lack of self-awareness continue to surface as Miss Meeks goes through her first lessons. He shouts “Yahoo!” at inopportune times and jumps out of his seat, getting more excited than the other children do. He also has more difficulty than others while writing his name. Although Zinkoff is proud of his work, the narrator dips into Miss Meeks’s interiority as she judges his penmanship, likening it to a two-year-old’s scribbles. But while she notices he is “sloppy,” Miss Meeks does not consider that Zinkoff may have a learning disability. In this way, Spinelli subtly introduces the theme of neurodiversity, showing how certain conditions—such as dyslexia, ADHD, or autism—can go unacknowledged by educators, leaving students in need of accommodations without additional support.
Zinkoff’s difference also makes him stand out on the playground. During recess, older boys steal his giraffe hat and toss it around. Zinkoff, however, laughs along, feeling none of the humiliation the boys expect. One of them tries to exercise his power over Zinkoff by saying the hat actually belongs to him. Although Zinkoff is sad, he does not assume any malice or cruelty in the boy’s statement, believing that hat must be his. Because of his inherent kindness, he feels happy that the boy has his hat back. The irony of Zinkoff’s response makes the boy angry, because Zinkoff unwittingly strips him of his power. With this scene, Zinkoff reveals how Zinkoff’s lack of self-awareness involves an inherent lack of shame, making him immune to the humiliation he might otherwise experience.
