Schools tend to be bleak places in Pinkwater's fiction. This may partly reflect his own experiences in school, although he has so far given few public hints of how he views the schools he attended. On the other hand, he is open about the audience he hopes to reach— the outsiders, the nonathletes, and all young people bedeviled by uncompassionate adults, pimples, and academic regimentation. The presentation of a hostile school environment has a harder edge to it in Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars than in most of Pinkwater's other books because of how Alan and Leonard respond to it.

Both seem to be trapped in the routine of attending a school that cannot or will not meet their intellectual and emotional needs before they have grown into people capable of independent, positive action. Alan therefore amuses them both by tripping the good-looking, well-dressed...