The Horror of YA

Whenever I want to get angry at elitist claptrap, I read Canada's newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It never fails to contain some sort of godawful, ill-researched article proclaiming that The Great Unwashed Masses are causing the end of the world, usually written by some white guy scratching his head while he sits in his ivory tower.

The article entitled: "Welcome to a novelist's nightmare: Gothic is in" is no exception.

I can't find a byline anywhere (that would be entirely too logical), but here's what our anonymous author has to say:

“Young adult” has always been a troublesome category. It didn't exist when I was a teenager. We just had to read adult novels – which we did, gluttonously. There was no intermediary stage between children's books – such as the Narnia series – and The Catcher in the Rye... Jane Eyre has been a favourite of teenage girls since it was published. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was perfect for me at 14... I don't understand why we need another category. Indeed, to say these classic books are enjoyed by young people is hardly to banish them to a less-than-serious category, it is to acknowledge their greatness.

Yes, that's right. How foolish and backwards, is this so-called "Young adult" category of books. It's a terrible idea. Let's publish FEWER books that would interest young readers, and make teens read For Whom the Bell Tolls - because, as we all know, kids don't know what they really want. They may THINK they want to read about wizards, dragons, or vampires, but they would simply be wrong. They need adults to tell them. And we say they should be reading Hemingway.

There were no YA books when I was growing up, either. I went from kids' books to Tolkien, then on to Anne Rice and Stephen King. I never even liked Anne Rice, but I read it anyway. There just wasn't much else to read. I have always loved Catcher since I first read it at fifteen, but it's a slim little book and can't carry a teen for a good seven or eight years of reading.

When I look at the YA market today, I feel only one thing: A voracious, healthy case of envy. I didn't like Twilight when I read it at thirty-two, but oh, if I had been twelve, I would have been in heaven. If I were twelve I would be bankrupting my parents, endlessly reading the dragon fantasies and horror-gothics and YA historicals and mysteries and whatever else any YA publisher could put out, as fast as they could print it.

All I can remember of being a young adult reader is a constant feeling of lean hunger, a never-quite-full reader's belly, wishing for something I couldn't name, something aimed at girls besides Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, and Sweet Valley High. To suggest that a YA book market is somehow extraneous or unneeded seems utterly out of touch to me.

But then again, the author goes on to bemoan:

I'm sure I wasn't the only novelist to hear about [The Gargoyle's Andrew] Davidson's sudden riches with a painful tightening of the heart – the pain that accompanies the fear that what one is doing is completely out of touch with popular tastes, that one's work is useless and unloved, that even trying to finish the new novel is pointless, that one should think about going to teachers' college, and so on.

Watch it - your jealousy is showing. And if you are actually concerned, as you claim, about being "out of touch with popular tastes", you might want to consider taking a look at what the kids are reading. And, for a change, taking it seriously.