the destroyer > reviews > On YA Lit Crit / Ted McLoof

SITTING AT THE KIDS' TABLE: CONSIDERING YOUNG ADULT LIT CRIT

“You’re an idiot.”

When locked in literary debate, this is the easiest criticism one reader can lob at another—the infantilizing accusation that one reads a certain kind of literature out of stupidity. These accusations have existed for quite some time, but they’ve just recently hit a new hysterical pitch. In the Academic v. Populist Criticism Cage Match, for the first time ever, the populists are winning. And it’s driving the academics fucking nuts.

Considering infantilization is the charge, it’s unsurprising that young-adult fiction is at the center, a genre—though there are arguments on both sides to discourage labeling it so—that never asked to be the subject of a literati brawl. Before getting into exactly why and how an unassuming phenomenon like YA fiction entered the fray and became the subject of so very much contention, it’s important to discuss why these Cage Matches keep happening in the first place.


ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS

The discourse we’ve seen recently in the literary world dates back to just around the beginning of the twentieth century. In What Is Art For?, anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake suggests that that the entire distinction between “high art” and “low art” is relatively new. In the long history of the human race, Dissanayake argues, art has been used mainly as a community activity—skin painting, weapon decoration—and thus was inclusive rather than exclusive. The concept of labeling certain kinds of art as “better”, higher”, or “more sophisticated” than others isn’t only new in that context—it’s antithetical to the entire reason art came into existence.

Still though, we live in a post-Kant, -Hegel, and -Schopenhauer world, and we’ve developed artistic palates and sensibilities that lead us to ignore our hunter-gatherer roots. As a result, we’ve split into two basic critical camps:

In one corner are Prescriptivists, who believe very strongly that there is art you (the audience) should absorb and art you shouldn’t, and who take great pains to draw clear lines defining which is which.

In the other corner are Descriptivists, who see the preceding sentiment as pretentious and classist and elitist, and believe that whatever art people want to absorb has merit—that the fact that it’s being absorbed is the very thing that gives it merit.

The maddening thing about art in general and literature specifically is that its entire point is to help us not to answer but to question. As a result, the Ouroboros-style arguments literature tends to propagate lead to even fewer answers and even more questions, until you have a real hair-in-hand eye-crosser by the end of them. For example, a question so easy it seems like an underhand toss would be, “What qualifies as young-adult fiction?”, but that question only leads to a broader one: “What is a work of art?” This question lurks at the heart of any good Prescriptivist/Descriptivist argument, yet in John Carey’s seminal text What Good Are the Arts? (and note that even the fucking title of these books are posed as questions) he meticulously combs through centuries of art only to come to this conclusion: “There are no absolute values in the arts. We cannot call other people’s aesthetic choices ‘mistaken’ or ‘incorrect’, however much we happen not to like them. Or, rather, we cannot do so rationally…Other people’s feelings are inaccessible to us, and there is no criterion for deciding which feelings have universal value, as opposed to value just for us.”

That very sentiment might just be the reason why these arguments perpetuate for years and years, and also probably why they remain pretty surface-level (sift through recent articles on the culture wars in the The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Slate, et al., and you’ll see that they aren’t very well-researched, and when they are, they go back at most to maybe fifty years ago; you’re not likely to find much discussion of hunter-gatherer societies). And so the argument ends up being a kitten tethering a ball of string back at itself. Ruth Graham of Slate recently wrote a scathing Prescriptivist article bashing populist reading habits by remarking that “adults should find popular YA fiction way too simple…we are better than this,” and that today’s readers are “missing out on the complexity of great literature.” The problem with this kind of argument, obviously, is the fuzzy nature of exactly what “great literature” is, and who decides that, and who is supposed to be reading it, and how often, and for what express purpose? The problem, in a nutshell, is that when pushed to its furthest extreme, the argument results in fascism.

And then you have Nick Hornby, writing in a 2006 article for The Believer: “Please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book—The Da Vinci Code, maybe—because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others.” This—clearly Descriptivist—argument has a lot to recommend it. It makes you feel infinitely better about the classic books you yourself haven’t read (because who cares what a “classic” is anyway?). It also seems to give at least a slightly clearer answer to the question of why we should read for pleasure. But the problem with this argument and its adherents is that, when pushed to its furthest extreme, it results in the abolition of any standards of any kind. If Descriptivists were truly sincere about their anything-anyone-reads-can-qualify-as-literature logic, then there’s absolutely no point in ever critiquing anything, or teaching anything (one student might not be as engaged with the book in the curriculum as another).

What’s also strange about these arguments is their particularity to literature. Were one to claim that one’s favorite kind of De Niro film was the Focker franchise rather than Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, it’s difficult to imagine a huge cultural uproar or an entire field of study defending that position. Nor do we see an army of Prescriptivist critics griping in article after article over what kind of sculptures we should look at in our local galleries. Part of this has to do with literature’s specific role as a medium of pure language: “Literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal, and qualification are its essence,” writes Carey again—though it’s exactly those four criteria that make criticisms of our literature just as hard to nail down.

And that’s where YA fiction enters in.


PLEASURE ME

It’s no secret that Harry Potter kicked off the current adult fascination with YA books, both because today’s twentysomethings grew up on JK Rowling and because the books, apparently, transcend the kind of prose we traditionally expect of books written for teenagers. Plenty of research points to Millennial fear of an unforgiving economy (and general growing up) as a reason for the fanatic attachment to escapist literature. But excusing the fantasy elements of Harry Potter that led to renewed interest in the likes of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, let’s concentrate on how Harry Potter’s YA appeal has affected the dialogue regarding our readerly tastes, because here it gets interesting. The muddle I described in the previous section—the inability to come up with answers, to establish a concrete, black-and-white definition of the “good” and the “bad," to determine how and why and what we read—comes a little more into focus when we discuss YA fiction.

Certainly the attraction to the argument for exasperated critics is that there are much, much clearer definitions here. The audience, for instance, for which YA fiction is intended is thankfully simple: teenagers. NPR held a recent poll in which the distinct age range we mean when we discuss YA fiction came out to 12-18, and probably the best thing about this poll is how needless it was; we pretty much knew that anyway. Of course, the question of who should be reading YA fiction is still hazy, but even the most die-hard adult YA fiction fans will concede that the books aren’t expressly written with them in mind.

And then we look at the question of why we read, and again, in the context of YA fiction, the answer is, if not definitive, at least quantifiable. For if the age intended for these books is 12-18, then by definition the audience hasn’t read all that much (they only learned how relatively recently, after all), and so we’re still giving them the hard sell on reading as a way to spend their time. We are invested in their literacy, in their potential to love books. But where does that investment come from? Why do we care? If, as Descriptivists would argue, the main purpose of reading is purely for pleasure—whatever pleases someone counts as art—then it’s safe to ask, Why do we even give a shit? Why don’t we just have kids play Nintendo or whatever kids today do for pleasure?

Or is the real question this: What do we mean by “pleasure?” Can being actively engaged with the world around you qualify as pleasure? Can we get pleasure from learning basic historical facts, or challenging our worldviews, or discovering the inequities persistent in modern American culture? Or does pleasure simply imply instant gratification, escapism, wish-fulfillment?

Let’s assume for a moment that it’s entirely possible to convert a YA reader into an avid adult one by offering them cogent, realistic starter-kit-type literature as a stepping stone to more complex books later on (because, again, even die-hard adult fans of YA fiction will admit that the reason we teach YA books in middle school is to transition kids into adult books, no?). Hornby’s above point—that the true magic a seemingly “low art” book can perform is “revealing the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others”—clearly suggests that this hypothetical reader will then move forward after this revelation, rather than laterally.

Ultimately though, if we’re to see YA fiction as a genre unto itself, rather than a miniature version of the adult book world, the real argument goes back to the original point here, Descriptivist/Prescriptivist, Academic v. Populist Critical Cage Match stuff, wherein what we’re really asking is whether YA fiction should be read—not just by teens, but by anyone. Can adults read YA fiction and be as challenged and engaged as teenagers are? Can they get pleasure not just through escapism or wish-fulfillment, but through the pleasure of learning, challenging, discovering, et al.?


THE USUAL FORMULA

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp, a recent YA novel, was published to critical acclaim, and comes with ringing endorsements from Kirkus Reviews (“this intriguing work demands an audience”) and Booklist (“A moving, sensitive debut from a writer to watch”). It is, to be sure, all three of those adjectives, and it moves quite well. Sutter Keely, the seventeen year old protagonist, is an alcoholic, though he doesn’t call himself that; he’s done research online and makes excuses for why he meets all the criteria: Do you drink in the morning? “Not because I need to. It’s just a good change of pace.” Do you drink alone? “Why is drinking alone so bad anyway? You have three or four beers sitting on your windowsill while listening to your iPod. What’s wrong with that?” The way Sutter’s problem is handled is deft. And smartly avoids after-school-special style moralizing; he’s a really charming guy, and the first-person narration reflects that—he charms the reader just as he charms everyone else he comes into contact with. Tharp’s ability to present his teenage protagonist as both a breezy, ingratiating con-man and an angry, pent-up kid is impressive, made all the more impressive by the balancing act he pulls off when Amy enters the novel. Amy defies the usual YA novel heroine; she’s her own person, and she doesn’t actually “need” Sutter, at least not as much as he needs her.

What’s startling about The Spectacular Now is how un-teenage the characters seem, not just as the protagonists of a YA novel but as any kind of recognizable teenager at all. They exist in a bubble, in a land where only they and their parents have ever existed. They do things at night that teenagers don’t do (make ice-filled bars in their trunks and drive around passing beers out; go to bars) and say things teenagers don’t say (“Last summer was a hardcore pugilist”). But it’s exactly these elements of The Spectacular Now that distinguish it from other YA books that kowtow to their audience’s wishes. Sutter in fact does not Get the Girl nor does he even try; his realization, when it comes, isn’t that he should quit drinking but that it simply isn’t in him to stop, so he ends up in a bar, telling his story to the kind of men he’ll inevitably become.

I bring this up only to point out that YA lit doesn’t have to follow the usual formula—it just happens to sell a lot of books. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim makes the argument that the best way we can prepare children and adolescents for the adult world is to give them literature that acknowledges it. Grimm’s Fairy Tales offer gruesome, unpretty looks at the universe, and Catcher in the Rye, a high school curriculum staple, finds its protagonist ordering prostitutes during a weekend in New York, never culminating in any soap-opera-style climax (Holden’s nervous breakdown happens after the story ends). The Spectacular Now takes a dry-eyed look at its protagonist’s problem, and the protagonist just happens to be a teenager. The Spectacular Now is an example of a book that does the job YA fiction should do—it matures its adolescent audience by maturing its characters. True, it was a National Book Award nominee—so does that mean that it isn’t really YA fiction? But it was nominated in the category of YA, so what does that mean? Does that prove that book critics are still making YA authors sit at a special designated kids’ table? Or does the fact that the National Book Awards even include a YA category prove that literary critics aren’t that prejudiced after all?

I think the answer is the latter, which proves the ultimate point: that, weirdly, the Prescriptivists end up looking like the true populists in this debate, at least as far as YA fiction is concerned. Considering writers and critics are the ones shaping the debate, the real cosmic joke might be that the thing we keep messing up is the rhetoric we use. Calling people idiots for their reading habits is really just another way of saying, “There’s better stuff out there, and you’d like it. I know you would.” The Descriptivist solution to a waning literacy level is to encourage democracy, an abolition of standards, and a belief in the idea that the only way we’ll get people to read is to not expect much of them, leave it all up to a matter of taste. But what they seem to overlook is the fact that standards of any kind are there to be met, and therefore conceal an intrinsic belief in the ability of the people to meet them.