Are We Better than This?

A controversy has been raging lately in the juvenile book world—or at least a flurry has been flurrying—based on an article written by Ruth Graham and published in Slate. In it she says, “Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” And she follows it by saying, “Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.”(I couldn’t help but wonder how old got categorized with snobbish and joyless. But as someone who doesn’t see the early 1990’s as “way back,” I probably have a different perspective than Ms. Graham does on old.)Wading into the fray is irresistible, but I might as well say it up front. I’m wading in on the wrong side.No . . . I’m not going to agree that anyone should feel “embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” Also, I think the whole idea that anyone should set herself up as the arbiter of others’ reading tastes is pretty high handed if not ludicrous. And while Ms. Graham speaks of books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting as having “provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life” but then goes on to say she has no urge to re-read them because she is now “a different reader,” I find myself wanting to suggest—gently, respectfully—that if she did go back to reread juvenile novels of that quality, she might find they speak to her in a whole new way.For my part, I’m excited about what’s happening in the world of realistic young-adult fiction. YA authors are reaching an audience we could only dream of when I came into the field. Such fiction has grown, not just longer and more complex, sexier and more honest on a wide variety of topics, but the literary standard has been raised, as well. I believe there is more good writing in our field than there has ever been.But still . . . I have a confession.I used to read YA fiction, or what used to pass for YA fiction, constantly. I read it as much for pleasure as to keep abreast of my field. These days that has changed. I read young-adult fiction only when I feel the need to know a book for professional reasons or because it is written by a friend.Why?Something profound has changed, and I’m standing too close to know how much of the change is me and how much is the stories we are telling. But I’m finding YA fiction increasingly claustrophobic.It is inevitable, as Graham suggests, that books about adolescents are written without the overarching wisdom of an adult perspective. Or if it’s there by virtue of the fact that the book’s author is an adult, it better remain well hidden. (I wrote Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins through the voice of an adult looking back in order to include that larger perspective, and the book failed quite spectacularly to reach its intended audience.) But beyond that limitation, our teen fiction has come to be so adept at plumbing the adolescent psyche that it too often leaves out the larger world in which adolescent loves and losses occur.Which is another way of saying that few of today’s stories written for teens enlarge my perspective, and isn’t enlarging our perspective a significant part of what reading fiction is about? (I must acknowledge, too, that I am so far beyond the intended audience for these books that I risk revealing more about my own old-lady mentality than about the books I’m commenting on in saying this.)I stopped teaching developing writers several years ago for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I was beginning to feel that I could no longer be a good critic of adolescent literature. Much of what I was reading, even when well written, left me bored and restless. Not an ideal place from which to mentor aspiring writers. (Middle-grade and younger literature lives in a different world, usually a larger one by virtue of being family oriented, so my impatience hasn’t extended to that.)I don’t say any of this as a criticism of the writers producing this literature. It appears to me that many of today’s adolescents live in a peculiarly insular world, one in which their limited reality fills the landscape all the way to the horizon. And it makes sense that if we are going to write for this audience, we need to begin with—if not necessarily remain totally limited to—the world they know.I have a passel of adolescent grandchildren whom I observe with pleasure and deep love, so I don’t say this as a criticism of our young people, either. If it is criticism at all, and not just observation, it is of a society that has found too little meaningful use for this whole segment of our population.But that brings me back to the young adult novels that set off this discussion. When I turn to them, I do often find myself wanting more. And so I go to adult novels to search . . . and, let’s be honest, I don’t always find the more there, either! But I’m far more apt to find it there.Is it possible for our adolescent literature to encompass a larger world? I would like to think so. But then I am the author of a novel that tried to do precisely that and failed.So who am I to judge?