respecting teens doesn't mean thinking they're adults

[deborah]

My posts have a tendency towards the Fully-Formed Opinion model of essay, but this one is more of a request for you guys to help me formulate my opinions, and my burgeoning discomfort with a new form of exceptionally clever ™ young adult and middle grade fiction.

This post contains one minor spoiler for Adam Rex's Fat Vampire, in that it mentions where one scene takes place. Comments may well contain more substantive spoilers.

I've always been of the opinion that children and teens need not be patronized, and they are smarter than we give them credit for. This is hardly a subversive idea. Daniel Handler's snide comments about children's books called The Pony Party aside, darling sweet books for twee ickle children were not the mainstream when I was a child, when Dan Handler was a child, or now. Certainly there is a historical spectrum from Pollyanna, through Anastasia Krupnik, to Coraline, but these days there's nothing standout about middle grade or young adult books that treat their readers with respect for their intelligence and subtlety. (Note: I said this badly; sanguinity clarifies.)

Where I am concerned, though, is the growing number of books that seem to me to be treating their readers as adults. That is to say, as inexplicably pimply people who happen to be incarcerated in schools but who have all of the history and experiences of the adult teachers, librarians, and booksellers who are heavily influencing the decisions about what books appear on their shelves. It's not just the snide, post-ironic nudging and winking that's getting me down. It's the assumptions of adult experience.

In Adam Rex's Fat Vampire, for example, there's a scene that takes place in a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One character is rewarded for bad behavior by some other characters in the text who are usually seen in a positive light. There's no voice of condemnation, from the narrative or from the other characters, of the character's bad behavior. One character becomes progressively more silent and uncomfortable, but the representation of that character's discomfort is subtle -- and in my opinion, much too subtle.

The adult reader of the books such as Fat Vampire has a high likelihood of knowing the culture of RHPS well enough to recognize why that character's behavior, seemingly appropriate for the context, is actually quite bad behavior. But the middle school reader of the book (and make no mistake, a book about young high schoolers is probably being read primarily by older middle schoolers) has almost certainly never attended RHPS. That middle school reader, like the badly behaving character in the text, is probably a Rocky Virgin, ignorant of the social conventions of the cult phenomenon.

More power to a text which wants to bring middle schoolers to a cult experience like Rocky, but the text can not assume the readers already know about it. If there is a social experience that has different rules than the ones readers have already been learning at school, at home, on the Internet, then the text should not be acting as if the students already know what is good behavior and what is bad behavior.

Fat Vampire is an extreme example, because it's easy to point to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as having a set of mores which are likely to be completely inexplicable to young readers. (And because of my vast and abiding love for Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday, which made me read Fat Vampire extremely closely.) But it's certainly not the only example. More and more I'm finding that young adult and middle grade fiction seems to be leaning on an artistic subtlety which assumes its readers are going to have the reactions of adults. Although of course right now I'm looking over a list of books I read in the last couple of years and I can't come up with any good examples, so maybe I'm lying. Maybe Fat Vampire just really, really pissed me off.

Comments

[cathexys]

I think this is a really important point. Young adults are not adults, and treating them as such seems to me abusive IRL (i.e., making a child an emotional partner, burdening adult responsibilities on them, statutory rape, etc). And I think your point about subtlety and ambiguity is quite well taken. I have to think a bit more if i can come up with examples but...I think there's also a huge difference between teaching a book and just handing it to someone. I've spent a lot of time in the past year or so going through the issues that have come up in my kids' readings and talking about them and explaining. So, yes, i hear what you're saying.

On a different topic: Is Coraline a sweet book? I haven't read it but had a different impression?

[sanguinity]

I was a little confused there, too. I understood deborah to be tracing out a historical shift from Pollyanna (which I know only by reputation) through Anastatia Krupnik (which seems fairly typical of its era to me, where families are deliberately shown as having cosmetic flaws but are still fundamentally loving and trustworthy), to Coraline (which I haven't read, but I understand to be fairly dark, with the family not only having more-than-cosmetic issues, but the plot calling into question whether a loving family is really all that good thing in the first place).

[deborah]

Right, that's what I meant. I clearly said it badly, and I've edited the post to link to your comment which clarifies it.

[cathexys]

Oh, duh :) That makes sense. i didn't know the middle book and thus couldn't quite parse the statement 9or thought I'd missed an obvious reading :)

Thanks!

[michelle]

It occurs to me that perhaps we are looking at the from the wrong direction. Maybe Fat Vampire's characters read as too adult because Adam Rex is, in fact, not writing a young adult book. He is actually writing a book for adults, hipster, PBR drinking hipsters who will "get" the hipster-irony of it all. Even the fiction that he is a "young adult writer" helps make the book even more hipster-ironic.

This is all just a crazy idea that has no real facts to back it up. I just wanted to toss it out there.

[deborah]

Yes, this is actually the direction I'm leaning as well. It's kind of The Stinky Cheese Man genre I'm leaning towards. I have the idea that now that young adult has lost a lot of its taboo nature, but a lot of books being published for young adults are really for adults, thus the sly hipster post-ironic nudging and winking. And it makes me uncomfortable.

(This happens with books I love as well. I have the impression from multiple anecdotes that most of the readers of Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief series are adults.)

[cathexys]

Oh, what a fascinating idea. and yes, that makes it even more insidious though, doesn't it? Because unless you KNOW that, people will give these books to their kids assuming they're meant to be for their ages...

[deborah]

And I like your RL parallels. Statutory rape is such a loaded comparison and yet there is a real similarity there (and I can't figure out how even to begin to say that without implying that I am the seriousness of statutory rape, which of course I'm not). But there's a difference between respecting the sexuality of children as valid, and treating children and teens as if they have the experience to participate on an equal footing with adults in a sexual relationship.

And yes, teaching vs. handing. I've also been thinking a lot about the difference between making a book available at a bookstore or library (which I'm pretty much always in favor of), teaching a book, and the middle ground of putting some kind of adult stamp of approval on a book (e.g. having it on a DEAR shelf in a school, handing it to a child, having a teeny tiny school library with limited shelf space that could go to some other book). Stamp of approval without being available to talk to the readers is a weird and funny middleground that changes as the implied reader's age.

With respect to Coraline, sanguinity got it right. I've edited the post to clarify, but what I meant was that books for children were likely to be fairly sweet 100 years ago, through an increasingly gritty realism as we approach and pass through the 60s-80s, into the much darker books of the present. (Although I am absolutely oversimplifying. A lot of that comes from increase in commercial power of young adult as opposed to children's literature.)

[cathexys]

Yes, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go there but after explaining statutory rape to my almost teen and explaining the inherent complexities yet also why i nevertheless think that there is grounds for having that law...it's a blunt analogy but as you point out the parallels are there in that we do want to acknowledge and appreciate children's sexuality and yet think that certain adult acts (by adults) are inappropriate and should be treated as illegal.

Oh man, do I know the stamp of approval now; the responsibility of recommending and doing so as an adult to a child rather than peer to peer. It's a fraught arena, but if Michele's suggestion holds it is even more problematic...

[deborah]

Right! I mean, you know my obsession with genre markers. How often (as an adult with the responsibility of recommending books to those who recommend them directly to children) am I misidentifying a book as being appropriate for a certain age group simply because it has the right genre markers? How often am I leading you and the other direct mediators wrong because the book follows all the genre tropes of a young adult book so accept that packaging at face value?

[aveleh]

I remember having a similar guh moment while reading the Nuddy Pants books, where so much of it was ridiculousness but there were repeated behaviours that just weren't... recognized for what they were, I guess? I *love* a good use of unreliable narratives, but if you're writing for an audience who doesn't have the tools to know this stuff on their own and also don't give them the tools elsewhere in the narrative, it's a strange narrative technique to use.

(In the Nuddy Pants books it was less that the behaviours were particularly bad - Sammy Keyes are aimed at 9+ readers and regularly introduce mature themes - but the way they're presented.)

[oursin]

Oh yes - this resonates with me. I was once given to read, as a child, or possibly early teenager, Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, as 'suitable reading' (it's about kids...). Although this is about a young girl and boy creating a garden in the midst of slums (?on a bombsite?), Frances Hodgson Burnet it is not and I found it somewhere between incomprehensible and deeply depressing. Just because a book is about young people, does not make it reading for them (this applies to quite a lot of Godden's other works, although I will say I have come to love many of her books since that early trauma).