"Not quite Sophie Beer" by Dan Foy, www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/, used under Creative Commons License
Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in literature for young adults, and claims that these “problem books” ”appeal to the worst in every teenager.” He prefers classics, such as Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, which deal with problems of adolescence at a “prophylactic distance.”
I could easily make fun the phrase “prophylactic distance” and respond to Mills’s argument, but I realized, as I read the essay, that it would be pointless. Mills and I have a difference at the foundation of our views about what the purpose of young adult fiction is. I’ve come to think of it as reformative versus formative.
In reformative young adult fiction, readers are presented with an idealized vision of adolescence. The main characters in these books experience some difficulties without getting too sullied by them. They do not despair. They do not rebel in any significant or dangerous way but learn from their troubles and come out better for having had a life lesson. They are adolescents as adults wish them to be: curious and seeking their individuality but not hurting themselves or their parents in the process. These books depict adolescence in a muted way — the troubles of growing up are there, but they are easily met and resolved. The overriding virtue of these books, as Mills sees it, is their virtue: they are “morally serious.” I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with books like these; some of the books Mills cites are favorites of mine, like Anne of Green Gablesand His Dark Materials.
However, I don’t think books like these offer a full complement of experience to contemporary young readers. As a young adult, I adored classic books about teenagers, but I also read Judy Bloom and V.C. Andrews– and classics that would probably fail in Mills’s scrutiny, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar. As the reformative point of view has it, books like the latter indulge the teenager’s propensity to be self-centered, self-pitying, values-questioning, and, ultimately self-sufficient. Reformers like Mills do not want adolescent problems to be too “tawdry,” and he does not want those problems to be solved without God and family. But as I see it, self-pity, misery, desperate longing, foolish experimentation, and real problems, are natural parts of adolescence, and to deny the (sometimes uncomfortably graphic) depiction of adolescence from the adolescent point of view (as much as adult writers like me can recapture it) is to deny teenagers the reality of their experience.
And this is key: So much of how teenagers are regarded is as a sort of liminal species whose concerns are both temporary and not as important as they think they are. Recently, my therapist asked me what characterized therapy that I had responded well to in the past — I thought back to being sixteen and sullen, of being twenty and scared, in a psychologists’ office, and the common factor worked its way through the memories of talking and crying into the foreground: My problems had been taken seriously. I was not treated as if I was in a stage, as if my mind’s workings (and non-workings, as it were) weren’t important as long as that mind was still forming. I wasn’t temporary, a rebellious teenager or a fickle young woman (as I had been characterized), to the therapists, or at least they didn’t treat me that way.
And that’s what, from a formative point of view, I think the best contemporary young adult fiction does. It doesn’t treat teenagers as if their minds are too fragile to contemplate themselves, as if their angst is unfounded or exaggerated. It says, “You are not alone or abnormal.” (Or in the case of V.C. Andrews, “See, you’re not abnormal. This is abnormal!”) And it sometimes even says, “Yes, things could be worse.”
