Public Enemy Number One, pt. 3

This is part of a series about James Frey—
Introduction (why this guy?), Part 1 (on the memoir), Part 2 (on the novel)

For those of you just joining us, here's my thesis again: James Frey is a despicable hypocrite.  He says he cares about literature, but he only cares about money, and in fact, his main way of making money has been to repeatedly, unapologetically, and viciously curb stomp everything that a legitimate champion of literature would stake his life on trying to protect.  This thesis is supported by a large body of evidence primarily consisting of everything James Frey himself has said and done throughout his entire career to date.  Yet, even with the blood splatters of all that is worthy gleaming on his sneakers and the pavement at his feet, James Frey attempts to explain away his behavior by claiming that it's all part of his "art," assuming -- perhaps correctly -- that most Americans are either too stupid or too easily intimidated by "artistes" to follow this line of logic any further.  We cannot allow James Frey to get away with this.

Because this matters.  I'm not saying that in jest.  We live in an era of anti-intellectual fatalism, an era where appearing on television is taken for a symbol of divine right to power and riches, an era where a refusal to compromise one's work or morals is taken for simple naivete about the machinations of capitalism.  But it is not inevitable that fraudulent douchebags will get huge book deals and dominate the literary landscape, all the while exploiting younger, poorer, and in all likelihood, more talented writers.  And if this circumstance does come to pass, due to the human errors of the cynical and feeble-minded, the least the rest of us can do is say something about it.

Or so was my thinking a little over a month ago, when I first saw this harrowing and well-written piece in New York Magazine about James Frey's fiction factory.

On the Fiction Factory

Full disclosure: I'm a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at Columbia University (although I don't know the author of the NY mag piece or anyone featured in it), and I've ghostwritten a couple of books myself.   So it's fair to say that the scheme described in this article hit close to home.  Although I'd certainly be repulsed by Frey's behavior regardless of what vulnerable population of writers he chose to prey upon, the fact that he chose this particular community -- a community that in my recollection was made up of wildly ambitious, dizzyingly insecure individuals, most with no business training and the daunting apparition of 5- or 6-figure student loans forever looming over the flip screens of their buggy laptops, a community both energized and lightning struck by the buzzing voltage of the industry surrounding it, a community of writers who may claw each others' eyes out in workshop but will still start a bar fight to protect one of their own -- well, let's just say it intensifies my ire.  And the fact that I actually have some first-hand experience with book packagers and the deals they usually cut with ghostwriters intensifies my suspicion about Frey's plans and motivations.

So let's start with the business end of things.  Here's the deal offered to ghostwriters, according to author Suzanne Mozes:

In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.

Later in the article, Conrad Rippy, a publishing attorney, points out another unusual aspect of this deal: there's no audit clause in the contract, meaning that there's no way to verify the amount that the writer is to get 40% of.

In a normal book packager's ghostwriting contract, the writer gets no credit and a flat fee in the thousands.  When I was ghostwriting, I wouldn't have had it any other way.  To me, writing trash that I didn't own was as faintly disgusting as it was amusing, the occupational equivalent of reaching into a toilet for lost ring; it might make a good story later, but it wasn't the first image of myself I wanted to present.  The upside of the deal consisted entirely of being able to walk away afterwards with a check in my pocket and my intellectual and artistic reputation intact.  It worked out okay for the packager too: they got their books on time and, after paying me, were able to stash the royalties with no further computations.

What Frey is attempting to do here is something very different.  He wants to own the work, sure, but he wants to own the writer too.

Why doesn't Frey just write these books himself?  Well, first of all, that would take work.  But second, the contract, at least as it is here described, is a contract for the writer as cash cow, or writer as scapegoat.  If the writer's career takes off down the line, then Frey is free to plaster the dude's face to the book's jacket and put a stop to lucrative deals the writer might try to make with other packagers or publishers.  If the book is a legal disaster (which has been known to happen), Frey can denigrate the writer and have him foot the bill.  And if the book is a success but Frey sees no particular benefit in giving credit where credit is due, then Frey can just take that credit for himself.

Moreover, the fact the writer is paid only $250 up front puts all of the risk on the writer as well, despite the fact that the company has all the creative control.  Let me repeat that one more time.  All of the risk is on the writer, despite the fact that the company has all the creative control.  So imagine the following scenario: Columbia MFA Pollyanna Goodheart writes a salable YA novel.  Over a period of weeks or months, James Frey makes her change everything about it, then makes further changes himself (perhaps inserting a subplot involving evil motorbike riders).  Editors everywhere patiently explain that the book, in its current state, is a piece of shit.  Pollyanna Goodheart no longer owns any version of the material she spent months writing, and 40% of nothing is still nothing.  She returns to her Morningside Heights studio apartment with $250, fifty of which she immediately needs to spend on antidepressants and rat poison from her local Duane Reade, while at the end of the day Full Fathom Five presumably still has greater assets than two hundred dollars hidden in a Frito bag and a birthday check from Grandma.  As Suzanne Mozes puts it, "So there's nothing to lose?  Except my time?"  Frey's reply -- "I have nothing to lose" -- seems right on the money.

I fear that here we've returned, once again, to the Kingdom of the Obvious, but since this is where Frey's culpability resides, we may be spending quite a bit more time here during this post.  Because this man is almost cartoonishly villainous.  And the worst part of his villainy, at least for me, is the fact that he won't own up to what he's doing, which is squeezing young, unpublished, desperate writers for the few valuable things they have: their talent, their time, and their reputations.  James Frey instead claims that he is trying to make an "art factory," the literary equivalent of the "factories" created by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.  Let's examine that claim a little further.

The first prerequisite of an art factory, I'd submit, would be that it, you know, make art.  "Well, how do you judge what art is, that's so subjective, art can be anything, it can be a urinal in a gallery, remember you love that movie with the plastic bag blowing in the wind -- you could say it's garbage, but maybe to him it's art," says the dippy sixteen year old me, who still sprawls on a beanbag chair somewhere in the backrooms of my mind, listening to Fiona Apple on her headphones and sobbing herself to sleep.  After smacking her around for the better part of an hour, here's how I'd reply. 

Art can be successful or unsuccessful, but what defines it as art is the attempt, on the part of the artist or artists, to convey a truth about the human experience.  What makes something not art but artistic prostitution is the attempt to pander to the audience in order to separate them from their money.  (Remember the cruise ship essay I mentioned?  DFW says it better than I ever could.)  And although there are occasions when the status of a work as art or not art can be subject to debate -- Castaway: auteur film or extended Fed Ex commercial? -- this is in fact not one of them.

I haven't read the books produced by Full Fathom Five because life is too short.  But even if I did, you could argue that I'm biased against them anyway, since I would be reading them with the sole intention of tearing them apart for this post.  So let's go with the opinion of someone who is, if anything, biased in favor of these books.  Yes, that's right.  Let's start with how James Frey himself defines literary art.  Here is a list of statements he's made on the subject:

• Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of Tropic of Cancer, “A Season in Hell,” and Paris Spleen—transgressive works by transgressive authors. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences; Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense; Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. These men created their own styles. (from Suzanne Mozes)
• "I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places... In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions." (direct quote, NY Mag)
• His goals as a writer are "to play with genres, to play with truth and reality, play with the rules people place on writing and art, which I wholly reject.” (direct quote, Vanity Fair)
• "I spent ten years teaching myself to write.  I spent ten years trying to find my voice... Throughout that time, one of my goals was to remove any and all signs of obvious influence from my work.  I did not want to be a clone.  I did not want to be the next version of someone else." (direct quote from "Music and Talking: An Essay" by James Frey)

OK, so based on these statements, what sort of projects would one expect to come out of an "art factory" headed by James Frey?  Well, we'd see books that are risky, innovative, and shocking, both in terms of form and content -- maybe something a little like the list published by a press like Akashic or featherproof or even Melville House, but really too inimitable, explosive, and new to compare to anything currently on the scene. 

So how does Frey describe the kinds of projects he wants to see his laborers tackling?  Here is a list of the statements he's made on the subject:

• Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next. (from Suzanne Mozes)
• Frey said he was interested in conceiving commercial ideas that would sell extremely well. (from Suzanne Mozes)
• “I’m sorry, but we’re looking for high-concept ideas that we can pitch in one sentence. We know it sounds cynical, but it’s what we know we can sell.” (through his assistant, NY Mag)
• In the meeting, Almon handed me a two-page outline, something that Frey said he uses in all his projects, to help my book with pacing. It was a classical Greek three-act structure, with suggested page numbers and advice on tracking the emotional narrative of the book, similar to a redemptive Hollywood movie. (from Suzanne Mozes)

Interesting: an "art factory" that, by Frey's own definition, doesn't produce art.

Interesting... interesting...

What am I saying?  "Interesting"?  Like hell it is!  There's nothing interesting about this at all!  The guy is a liar and a fraud!  He started as a hack screenwriter, wrote a memoir full of stuff he made up, got a 1.5 million dollar book deal for something that reads like Raymond Carver on Robitussin, and now he's exploiting writers to produce garbage so he gets even more money for DOING SHIT THAT IS WRONG.  Am I the only one who can see this?  Am I the only one here who is sane?  Listen, American literary culture: stop picking on Jonathan Franzen.  Here's the dude whose glasses you need to steal.

And if he isn't wearing his glasses, knock the contact lenses out of his eyes!

OK, OK, I'm not advocating violence here.  But really, guys.  Stop checking your Amazon ranking, minimize your grant applications, close Publishers' Marketplace for just one second, and listen to me.  This is worth getting upset about.

Because here's the thing.  We all want to be read.  We all want to have enough money to keep writing.  And we're all aware of the nonsensical demands of the industry that can provide us those things -- an industry all too often populated by soulless dreameaters who care nothing for the survival of our art.  But we do not have to become like them.  The one thing we have going for us, the only thing that makes our struggle worth doing, is the fact that we're right.  We're the ones who give and don't just take.  We're the ones who value something more than money.  We're the ones who question the status quo.  And that doesn't just make our lives bearable -- it makes the lives of the people who read our work more bearable, too.

So let me end this on a positive note.  There's nothing we can do to stop James Frey.  But there's also nothing he can do to stop us.  We just have to remember not to believe his lies: about what happened, what he's doing, or what matters, on the page or off, in a writer's life. 

There's more I could say about this -- there's always more I could say -- but for the time being, I consider James Frey properly chewed out.

It's a Zoo in Here: Animals in Fiction

When I was a child, one of my earliest lessons about fiction was on the component parts of a story: the primary ones hit upon were conflict, setting, theme, and characters.  Our teacher explained that "characters" were the "people" in a story, the actors who either caused the action or suffered the consequences of it.  I immediately raised my hand to ask if stories that featured only animals were then in fact stories at all.

Obviously, as my second grade teacher explained to me then and as I am well aware now, personified animals or even inanimate objects (from Toy Story's Woody to Asimov's robots to Pynchon's Byron the Bulb) can just as easily function as the protagonists and antagonists in fiction as actual living humans can, and many great stories, especially for kids, feature relationships between humans and non-humans front and center.  In stories of this kind, the enchanted creatures become the child's imagination externalized, made flesh, and tend to either mirror the child's thoughts about the adult world (Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth), provide fantastical tests for real-life moral quandaries (The Chronicles of Narnia, the film The Labyrinth), give the child the opportunity to reverse roles and take on the duties of protector or parent (The Indian in the Cupboard, the films The Iron Giant or ET), or supply reliable friendship and comfort while allowing the child to explore his identity outside of the confines of family (Winnie the Pooh, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes).  In all of these cases, though the creatures themselves certainly have independent goals and motivations, we see them through the child's eyes, and ultimately, we judge them in terms of the effect they have on the child in question.  As much as a reader may like a talking faun or a lovable robot, it's clear she's not meant to locate herself in those characters.  By definition, they are the Other.

We're aware that we see this character through the child-character's eyes.

For that reason, something odd tends to happen in stories where people and their civilization are conspicuously absent: we are forced to identify with someone inherently dissimilar to ourselves.  As a kid, my first exposure to stories of this kind was in Aesop's fables.  Interactions between a fox and a raven or a cat and the mice it pursues were unsettling, not just because of the unmitigated cruelty and violence (no second chances here), but because these animals, unmoored from the context of my world, were deeply unpredictable to me.  One story in particular, the fable of the scorpion and the frog, was especially creepy: a scorpion hitches a ride on a frog's back to cross a fast-flowing river.  The frog is uncertain if it should trust the scorpion not to sting it, but as the scorpion points out, if it stings the frog mid-journey, they will both sink and drown.  Still, in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings his companion anyway.  Why?  "It's in my nature."

What does this mean, "It's in my nature"?  Is the scorpion good or bad, active or passive?  Does a scorpion have free will?  Even as a young child, I knew that humans are sometimes slaves to their own biological imperatives: the need for a bathroom on a road trip, the need for a puke bucket during flu season.  Was the scorpion's need to sting akin to these exigencies?  Or was its need to sting more like the other, less uncontrollable urges I experienced: the temptation to palm a roll of Lifesavers from a convenience store or to break my toys in the midst of a tantrum?  If the scorpion had been placed in a story with a little girl, it would have been clear where my sympathies should fall -- the scorpion would be a villain, or, simpler than that, a mere danger, like a lit stove.  But in Aesop (whatever he may have intended), this clarity was lost to me; try as I might, I couldn't locate myself in either character.  Although the altruistic frog was certainly more lovable within the context of the story, the scorpion's needless cruelty raised questions about him too.  If a scorpion's nature was to sting, then what was a frog's nature?  And if that nature was just a matter of instinct, genetics, not something chosen, then wouldn't his potential for goodness or badness entirely depend on whose perspective the reader chose to adopt?  After all, if a story were told about the frog from the point of view of a fly, the frog would seem inherently evil too.

One of the big complicatons in stories entirely about animals comes with personifying more than one species of animal at a time.  I call this the Animal Farm effect.  In the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell (which does, in fact, briefly feature humans as well, though not in the same way as the kids' stories I described above), a mass revolt against an unjust farmer leaves the animals in charge.  Yet, over the course of the story, the pigs -- originally placed in a management role because they are the smartest of the animals -- take on more and more of the qualities of humans in their interactions with the other barnyard creatures, until finally they are living almost exactly as their human masters once did, inhabiting the farmhouse and walking on two legs while others serve them.  The rules of the farm, which once represented the interests of all, are now reduced to one simple credo: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. 

Orwell, who was using the story to make a statement about Stalinist Russia, clearly meant for us to reject this maxim: the barnyard animals are all sentient, all capable of speech, and thus all equal on the novel's terms.  But I think that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" does reflect something that's frequently true about the use of animals in fiction.  When creating a world dominated by animals, something must still be regarded as the Other in order for the animals' social order to be comprehensible to us -- in order for their life to at all resemble the relationship of human society to the natural world.  Even in Animal Farm, rats, songbirds, and rabbits play this role: the other animals attempt to "tame" them (signalling to the reader that "tameness" is the "humanity" of animals in this scenario) but without success.

The mid-90's Disney film The Lion King, for all its many embarrassing faults (if I never hear the saccharine song "Hakuna Matata" again, it will be too soon), succeeds in this one respect, at least.  With the exception of a meerkat, a wild boar, and a toucan -- all of whom are treated basically as servants and comic relief -- all of the speaking characters are predators, and the prey are basically de-personified.  In one memorable scene, a herd of bison trample a lion to death, not out of anger or a desire for revenge, but because they literally cannot be reasoned with.  They are running out of blind, unarticulated animal fear, seemingly unable to understand or even hear the cries of the main character for help.  For some lions to be "good" and some "evil," for the choices of a lion to have any moral weight, we must first establish that the central nature of a lion qua predator is morally neutral.  And we must do that by making it clear that the story is told from a lion's perspective.

I got to thinking about all these issues over the weekend, after seeing Zack Snyder's fun, gorgeous, and intermittently disappointing kids' feature, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole.  After Watchmen (particularly the magnificent, absurdly ambitious, aggressively postmodern ultimate cut version, which I wrote about here, here, and here), I doubted he was going to top himself with a picture about magic talking owls, and unfortunately I was right.  However, moments of this picture are still fucking glorious, beginning with a sequence at the beginning when an owl swoops down to snatch a mouse off a branch and then continues effortlessly in its flight.  There are a few ornithological non-sequiturs throughout (one plot thread asserts that owlets can be turned to zombies by being forced to stare at the moon as they doze off -- a weird idea, considering that the laws of nature and even the film itself firmly establish that the little dudes are nocturnal), and a feel-good musical montage that made the Lion King soundtrack seem as edgy and smart as Sweeney Todd's in comparison.  But the movie's best moments come when we see owls' own natural behaviors unexpectedly invested with emotional import. 

"Branching," when owlets glide from branch to branch while learning to fly, is a little like athletics, a little like driving lessons, yet not exactly like either: it occupies a space in an owl's life not quite equivalent to anything in ours.  And an even better scene (easily my favorite moment in the film), comes when the little sister of the two main owlets hawks up her first owl pellet, a solidified mass of mouse bones and fur that resembles something fossilized.  Panting and traumatized, spittle dripping from her beak, she stares in horror at the thing her body has just unwittingly ejected, while her nursemaid, a dippy snake, bustles around saying things like, "Oh, it's a beautiful day, the day of your first pellet!"  "You mean," the stunned chick replies, voice quaking with trepidation, "it's going to happen again?"  Vomiting up an owl pellet is a little like menstruation is to humans, yet it also happens to boys; it's a bit like losing a tooth, but it never stops, not even in adulthood.  At heart, it's a thing that happens only to owls, and it isn't transformed to parallel directly with human experiences -- but the way they respond to it, socially and personally, seems more or less the way people would, if people were owls.

Sure, they look real cute... until you see the gunk that comes out of their mouths.

In this sense, stories about animals or other non-human characters can be deeply subversive, and not just because they allow the author to veil controversial opinions under the guise of fantasy.  Rather, these stories are subversive because of the way they allow readers or viewers to set aside their own perspective to emphathize with one that, by its very nature, is profoundly foreign, even disturbing or grotesque.  Especially for kids, but really for all of us, that's a lesson that can't come soon enough.

Being Difficult

Back in 2002, Jonathan Franzen took a lot of flak for an essay he wrote for the New Yorker, entitled "Mr. Difficult."  It was, in part, about the works of William Gaddis and the changing relationship Franzen had to those works over the course of his life – and about the conclusion he ultimately arrived at, that at heart Gaddis's writing (after The Recognitions) coldly and unrealistically demands that readers "renounce the sinful pleasures of Realism and cultivate a selfless and pure love of Art."  Franzen writes that he believes there is no person in the world, not even Gaddis himself, who would rather read JR than watch The Simpsons, and concludes, "To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself... this violates what seems to me to be the categorical imperative for any fiction writer." 

Numerous writers, perhaps most notably Ben Marcus in a lengthy Harper's take-down, weighed in on this piece, many denouncing what they perceived to be Franzen's weird anti-intellectualism (an anti-intellectualism that was expressed in an impassioned and pages-long discussion of the entire oeuvre of a notoriously challenging and cerebral author, addressed to the readers of the New Yorker).  Had I been blogging at the time, I no doubt would have joined their chorus: there's something off-putting about Franzen's tone throughout the piece, something uncomfortable about the assumptions he makes of his reader, as if on a first date some dude reached across the coffee shop table to straighten the strap of your bra.  "The work of reading Gaddis makes me wonder if our brains might even be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from sentences as featureless as 'She stood up,'" he offers in an aside.  To which I'd be inclined to reply, "You don't know the first thing about my brain, 'Mr. Chomsky' – and I'd advise you to keep your hands to yourself." 

And yet, I've thought about that essay many, many times over the years, because in a certain way, I know he's right.  Not about Gaddis, necessarily (I've only read A Frolic of His Own, which I actually thought was a hoot), but about the subjective experience of difficulty, which few critics or essayists really ever discuss. 

Part of what makes reading fiction intense and passionate for me is the fact that it's personal, immersive, one-on-one: that when I am deep inside a book, it's as though I have the author all to myself.  The observations he makes feel almost like they come from inside my own consciousness; the characters' faces and mannerisms, their inflection, are supplied by me from the storehouse of my own experience.  Yet the flip side of that is that when I'm reading and I get confused, lost, I'm in that all alone too. 

In the time I've lived in New York, I've become adept at noticing the exact moment in my interaction with another person when I realize she's insane – actually, certifiably insane.  It happens more often than you'd think.  Once I was at the post office, waiting in an epic line, and the woman behind me and I were commiserating. 

"But you're shipping that domestically," I suddenly observed, noticing she held a Priority Mail envelope.  "You can just use one of the automated machines for that, you don't have to wait here." 

"Oh, I can't do that," she explained.  "Then the government would have my credit card information and they'd track everything I do."

Shields go up when I realize I'm speaking to someone I don't, can't understand.  When I'm reading a book, and it becomes difficult – really thwartingly, incomprehensibly difficult – shields go up, albeit slightly different ones.  Because the thing is, no matter how daunting and impenetrable I find a text, I basically assume that the person writing it is capable of communicating in a straightforward human way.  The fact that they're not, that they're choosing to be opaque, to talk crazy without being it, generally summons in me some knee-jerk feelings of resentment: feelings that are often dispelled by some purpose revealed later in the work, but that well up nevertheless.

"There is nothing like the headache you get from working harder on deciphering a text than the author, by all appearances, has worked on assembling it," Franzen writes. I've had that headache quite a few times myself. And yet only rarely do you see that experience acknowledged or talked about in the (rare) reviews of serious avant-garde fiction. In large part, people prefer to vaguely praise, vaguely criticize, or simply avoid writing about these books at all.  The difficulty – which might be the first (and last) thing many readers take away from their experience of the work – is ignored, making anyone who attempted to read the book feel even stupider, even more resentful, even more alone in his experience of what seemed like the writer's hostility to him, the wall going up on every page. 

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch where Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley play two businessmen meeting for the first time at an office party.  A coworker introduces them, then leaves them alone together.  McDonald tries again and again to engage Dave Foley in conversation, but Foley simply stands there and smiles (the man has an eerie, Cheshire-cat like smile).  When the coworker returns, Foley immediately speaks up and tells him horrible lies about McDonald – I think he calls him a bedwetter.  For many readers who are not writers themselves, this must be the experience, in a nutshell, of taking on one of the more "difficult" writers working today.  You try to engage with this author, you work hard to connect with him, and then as soon as someone else shows up, he makes you feel like an idiot.

The face of contemporary difficult fiction?

But why is it that we seldom talk about difficulty – that we so frequently exclude it from the conversations we have about books?  One reason, the most obvious, is that no one wants to sound like an idiot, even if he feels like one.  But another, equally strong reason is that there's a perception (and not an unfounded one) in the contemporary writing community that our art form is dying, and that it's time to circle the wagons to protect our own.  The very worst thing to say is that a book is so tough to get through that even another professional writer had to struggle mightily to keep turning the pages.

I have a friend who occasionally writes poetry reviews for an online journal.  The editor of this journal told my friend, in so many words, that they do not publish negative reviews, not of any book, ever.  The Believer takes a similar tack, and I'm sure they're not alone.  The idea behind this behavior is of course that negative reviews discourage book sales, and no one wants that – better that readers should approach a work with inflated expectations than not approach it at all.  But I would imagine that the actual result of this is not that "average" (i.e., not professional) readers read more literary books – it's that they don't read literary books or the publications that review them.  They feel excluded from the conversation, and so they leave it entirely.

To a certain extent, this can't be helped.  The fact is, some people eventually lose interest in reading anything with more substance than an InStyle article.  I call these people "Philistines," but to each his own. (There are plenty of art forms I know fuck all about myself – architecture, modern dance – so clearly I'm throwing stones from the roof of a greenhouse.)  But what makes me sad are the people who still have a craving for fiction, but seek out and read only kids' books or trash.

Which brings me back, in a long way, to the subject of my last post.  I think there's something to what Lev Grossman said in in the otherwise heinous Pamela Paul NY Times article "The Kids' Books Are All Right," about the way that YA fiction allows plot to thrive, and I'm going to ponder that more when I write on here next.  But one thing that I feel sure YA fiction offers people is the feeling that they are qualified to take part in a conversation about it, that they won't embarrass themselves like poor Kevin McDonald.  And to me, the fact that things have come to that pass is something that should make all of us feel pretty stupid.

Fahrenheit PG-13

Earlier this week, I made the mistake of reading this article by Pamela Paul over at the NY Times, and promptly went through all five Kubler-Ross stages of grief in alphabetical order, thus ending with depression.  I considered writing a blog post, but the only way I could imagine expressing my feelings was by somehow rendering a likeness of myself lying dead on a tumbled heap of Nabokov and Barthelme, Yates and Carver, my ruined heart overspilling itself, my face stained with tears of blood.  And I don't know how to work the timer on my camera.

It would've looked something like this.

But a couple beers later, it occurred to me that maybe I should put the goth face paint away and try to figure out exactly what it was about this article that upset me so much.  Because the thing is, as I said in my blog post about the show Avatar, I sometimes do enjoy narrative art that's intended for children, and so do a lot of other people I like and respect.  Among their number I'd even count Lev Grossman, the author of the very captivating, very flawed novel The Magicians who's quoted here (and whose point about plot I'll return to in my next post). 

I've written before (here and here) about the phenomenon of adults reading books for kids, and I stand by most of the points I made, especially that defensively snarling "at least I'm reading!" should not work as an excuse for anyone over the age of thirteen.  But when I think about it, I don't consider the real problem here to be what people read as much as the way they read it.   

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a huge believer in ignoring the artificial boundary lines of genre and often even "good taste;" of following one's passions and interests wherever they might lead.  In a recent essay for the NY Times, Rivka Galchen writes about super-brain Borges's eclectic, sometimes-slumming literary tastes: "If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff... Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books — pulpy and arcane alike — that few others bothered to see."  It's this kind of promiscuous reading that makes contemporary postmodern fiction possible: where would we be if Pynchon never read a boy's adventure novel?  Understanding high and low art, its devices and conceits and diction, reading it with an eye for what it leaves out, what it unquestioningly upholds, is absolutely essential for any writer (or reader) who wants to inhabit voices that are not her own.

And in a broader sense, the smartest, most interesting people aren't always interested in the smartest, most interesting things – I'm thinking here of David Foster Wallace's essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," about his falling in, and quite rapidly, out of love with a (most likely ghostwritten) sports memoir, or of the fictional Perkus Tooth's weird and sudden obsession with a mediocre Steve Martin movie in the wonderful Chronic City, or Wittgenstein's fondness for the laconic heroes of American cowboy movies, or the many other anecdotally observed cases of writers and intellectuals honing in on shitty, seemingly random pop culture ephemera, which sometimes serve as the subject for art or criticism but most often don't. These brief passions, lavished on the least deserving of objects (literary and otherwise), can be refreshing, even necessary, for intellectuals, providing something that the highest art cannot: a temporary refuge from the genius of others – a space to think for oneself.

But the thing I find disturbing about the phenomenon of adults reading YA in general, and the Pamela Paul essay in particular, is that these people (with some exceptions) aren't looking for a space to think; they aren't looking to think at all.  They're looking for pure entertainment and escape, and even worse, many of them have seemingly forgotten that art can offer more than that.  According to this article, anyway, they're not reading these books with an eye for what's been elided, what's been neatened or smoothed for the sake of the tweens.  They're not looking for a brief respite from the emotional and intellectual demands of serious literature.  They're looking for an out-and-out replacement for it.  And honestly, all their perky talk on the subject brings to my mind another genre: science fiction.

"Good Y.A. is like good television," says historian Amanda Foreman, who has the glassy, smiling eyes of a Stepford wife.  "There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or ­disappointed people.  Ever since I started taking Soma, I've felt so much less afraid." 

"They’re also easier to read, and people are tired,” author Lizzie Skurnick chimes in.  I see her as smartly dressed, with a chin-length bob and only a little of her brain dripping from her ear to the table.  "Here, try some Substance D.  You'll like it – everyone does."

"And none of it feels like homework," writes Pamela Paul from her desk in the Ministry of Truth.  "The themes are serious and the discussions intense, but the books are fast-paced and fun.  And there's always enough Victory gin to go 'round."

So tell me: am I overreacting?  Am I wrong?  And are you already one of Them?

Will It Bend? (pt. 2)

I saw The Last Airbender movie on Friday, and already I've forgotten most of it. The reviews are right: it is leaden and pretentious, afflicted with some of the worst child acting I've seen in a long time. In fact, Dev Patel, playing moody Prince Zuko, is the only one who even attempts to create a character, rather than squintily reading his lines from some giant cue card with improper punctuation positioned just offscreen. Yet, unfortunately for Patel, the script betrays him at every turn, offering him little more than ponderous exposition and a fight scene against the Avatar that looks more like two kid brothers wrestling in a cluttered garage. The other actors here do not even deserve our pity, although their characters are written just as badly, or worse. In possibly the most amusing moment of the film, Aang sits down to meditate in a holy place in the Northern Water Temple. "Some monks can meditate for four days!" he exclaims. He positions himself and closes his eyes. Four seconds pass. "Aang, can you hear me?" his friend Katara asks.

I could talk about some of the other bizarre decisions Shyamalan made regarding the story -- probably the weirdest was his decision to have benders execute an entire series of complicated dance moves before their various elements respond, which makes the "action" sequences move about as quickly as a poorly prepared middle school pom pom routine. But the greatest disappointment of this film is that it's not even fun to tear apart. Unlike the truly amazing crap films of the 1980's (including the gloriously depraved Howard the Duck, the epic failure Dune, and Trancers, a gem I discovered over the weekend, which stars Helen Hunt and a boom mike), The Last Airbender isn't mistakenly in love with a faulty, unworkable premise. Where Howard the Duck, for example, answered questions no one in their right mind would want to ask (like, "What would a sentient, midget-sized duck do in bed with Lea Thompson?"), The Last Airbender doesn't answer the basic questions its own characters raise -- like, "How could the earthbenders be defeated and contained when their weapon is the ground beneath their feet?" It's this incuriosity, more than anything else, that makes it suck.

For the love of God, I do NOT WANT TO KNOW.

It's also this incuriosity that makes it particularly lousy as a children's film. Anyone who's gotten on a bus with a second grader knows well the proclivity of man-larvae for the question, "Why?" One of the reasons behind the aforementioned trend of adults reading children's books is, I think, the fact that children's book authors are not afraid to answer this question, sketching out whole fantastical worlds with the resulting explanations. These worlds don't have to be realistic, but they do have to hold up under investigation -- to reveal causal connections, social relationships, customs, and habits that resonate and fit into the whole. In this sense, coming to understand the world of a story is an education in miniature for children who are at the beginning of learning about the order of our world. As I said in my previous post, the greatest strength of the original airbender show was the way that it rewarded the viewer for wondering about details -- about everything from the various nation's cultures to the flora and fauna of the wilderness. By comparison, the film isn't awful. It's just empty.

Will It Bend? (pt. 1)

In a couple of earlier posts (here and here), I wrote about a phenomenon that I would generously call "not a good sign": the increasing tendency of adults to prefer novels intended for children over novels intended for people their own age. Interestingly enough, this doesn't seem to be as prevalent a trend with other narrative arts. Though a large segment of the population, young and old, can be counted on to trek out to the latest Pixar offering, and Twilight and Harry Potter's grown-up fans never missed the chance to see them in theaters, most blockbuster protagonists are grown-up enough to wield firearms or disrobe onscreen, and the same goes for TV. Even shows like South Park, The Simpsons, and Family Guy, all of which prominently feature child characters, make that part of the joke: look, they're little kids, but they're advocating genocide, becoming members of Mensa, or talking like Rex Harrison (respectively). Our full enjoyment of these kidlets depends on us, the viewers, being able to see and identify their apparent contradictions from an adult perspective.

Nickelodeon's show Avatar: The Last Airbender is not like these other cartoons. The children in Avatar do things that real children couldn't, but we're not supposed to laugh at the impossibility; we're meant to suspend our disbelief. And the series as a whole definitely meets my criteria for a young adult story: the characters develop and age, but they never change in ways that permanently mar their innocence. It's certainly not intended for adults. Yet to me, the thing that makes it really terrific children's television, and entertaining for the rest of us, is the unique way the series as a whole is structured.

I find it surprising that, miniseries aside, so few television programs are constructed with the end in mind from the beginning. Like emperors demented with hubris, show creators must think that they are immortal, that they'll never have to relinquish their reign, and that their empire will only become more powerful the longer it exists. Of course, the opposite is true. The expression "jumped the shark" was coined just to capture that moment when a TV series goes from being relevant and entertaining to embarrassing, and I won't bother listing the shows where this has happened: it's nearly all of them. The ones that have escaped this grim fate ended too – they just knew when to stop.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is striking not for what it does so much as what it doesn't do, which is to careen wildly off course. In the first episode, the central path of the narrative is laid out. We learn that in the world of the story, certain gifted warriors are capable of "bending" or controlling each of the four elements: water, earth, air, and fire. Only one person can learn to control all four. This person is the Avatar, reincarnated in each generation, and in this one he's a little boy named Aang, the airbender of the title. But his duty to humanity is even greater than the Avatars of the past, because now the Fire Nation is intent on conquering the rest of the world. Only Aang can restore balance by freeing the other nations. And then, over the course of three seasons (each named for an additional element he masters: water, then earth, then fire), that's exactly what he goes on to do. This sounds predictable, and it is. But that macro-predictability gives the makers of the series incredible freedom to bring the world of the story, and its characters, to life in the individual episodes. Since they know where they're going, they can take their sweet time getting there.

Watching the series was useful to me as a writer, since I seem to find this simple truth very easy to forget. For a long time, in fact, I used to think that plots needed to be convoluted, or at least not "obvious," in order for the finished story itself to be wildly imaginative. When I made my first serious attempt at writing a novel in college, I so eschewed the notion of straightforward plot that I didn't even bother writing the action in sequence: instead, under the heavy influence of freshman year philosophy courses and Mountain Dew (which I consumed by the case), I scribbled random scenes into notebooks so filled with doodles they resembled illuminated manuscripts penned by gonzo monks. Every day I felt inspired. Some year and a half later, when I began to look back over the gory Frankenbook I had created, filled with characters hurling cats at one another and shouting about Descartes, I knew something had gone horribly wrong, but I didn't know what.

Perhaps Avatar: The Last Airbender might have saved me some time and the world some paper. I think the thing I find the most striking about it is how much fun the creators seem to be having, just making things up. Most of the animals in the show, for instance, are hybrids – badger moles, koala sheep, lizard rhinos, a lion turtle – and there's a weird moment of humor when a regular bear is introduced, much to the confusion of the main characters. Nearly every permutation of the four "bending" styles is eventually explored: although characters just start out controlling the basic elements, they eventually learn that other substances containing or contained by their elements are subject to bending as well. An earthbender learns that she can shape metal, forming a suit around her body; firebenders can shoot electricity from their fingers – or catch it and shoot it back; and in a genuinely creepy episode that might be the high point of the series as a whole, a waterbender learns that she can "bend" blood inside of people's veins, turning them into living marionettes. By the end of the series, I had the feeling that the makers of the show had completely exhausted their material, which I mean as a high compliment: there's nothing more frustrating than feeling like an artist didn't do his own idea justice.

The one sort of fire bender the show never includes.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the simple overarching structure of Avatar: The Last Airbender allows the show's creators to dig deep into their thematic material. Its peace-loving message may rival Fraggle Rock for naked idealism, but it beats the Fraggles hands down for subtlety. (Sorry, Wembly.) While most kids' shows with a moral message set up simple parables, solved over a single episode and generally with maximum preachiness, Avatar: The Last Airbender is able to build up to ideas slowly. The Fire Nation, which starts out as pure enemy in season 1, is gradually revealed to be a sophisticated, beautiful culture, as much worth preserving as the civilizations it decimates. And the people in it are complicated, products of their country's nationalism and xenophobia but not incapable of change. Similarly, though they learn to work together, the peoples of the other nations aren't a unified front: the Air Nomads are vegetarians while the Water Tribe eats practically nothing but meat; each nation worships its own gods. That's not the kind of idea that gets a lot of play on Captain Planet.

All of this is the reason that I was horrified when I saw that the show had been remade as a live-action movie by M. Night Shymalan; I was even more horrified when I read Roger Ebert's review. Nevertheless, because I apparently don't know what's good for me, I'm planning to see it later this week. I'd say I'm interested in finding out what happens when a sprawling narrative like this collapses in on itself to fill less than two hours, but that would be a lie. I'd really go to see any movie that promises a flying bison in glorious 3D.

For Kids of All Ages, pt. 2: High Water Everywhere

"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'Probably because of something you did.'" -- Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

Let's be honest: children are narcissists. They cry when they don't get their way. They throw temper tantrums. They pout. They shriek on the subway, they bawl on the bus, and god forbid you get seated next to one on an airplane. For a child, it's almost impossible to understand that his own emotional state (sorrow over a lost toy, excitement over a trip to the zoo, righteous indignation over a broken promise) is not permeating the atmosphere and affecting everyone he encounters. Conversely, when it rains on the day of a picnic, or refuses to snow come Christmastime, or when the weather outside takes another, darker turn, children turn inward; they use magical thinking to figure these indifferent external events into a personal narrative: God is angry with me, Santa knows what I did. The journey to maturity is, in part, a growing understanding that other people have their own inner lives, as intense and complex and consuming as one's own -- and that the things that happen in the world do not only happen to you.

In my last post, I talked about the genre of the Young Adult novel, and how for me that differs from a novel that's simply about young people (i.e., a bildungsroman or "coming-of-age"). I think that the central distinguishing factor between the YA and coming-of-age novels is that, in the coming-of-age novel, the child's narcissism at some point collides meaningfully with a world inhabited by others. And I don't mean a wise old baba who pops up in every few chapters to deliver homespun wisdom, or the bully at school who serves as an inexplicable thunderbolt of in-scene tension, or the Good Teacher who sees the narrator's potential. I mean other real characters, ones with motivations and drives and faults that have nothing to do with the journey our hero is on -- ones who could just as easily be the focus of a novel of their own. For just one example, in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, three characters (sisters Ruth and Lucille and their aunt Sylvie) tug in opposing directions: what each one wants is understandable, but mutually exclusive to the desires of the others. In negotiating her relationships with her aunt and sister, Ruth, for all her dreamy self-absorption, is forced to enter a realm where other people's loneliness, grief, and obsessions share equal time with her own.

For all its strengths, and there are many, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close does not share this quality, not ever but especially not at the end. And I'm going to sound the SPOILER ALERT right now, because much of what I have to say about the book relates to that ending, a ridiculous, saccharine, cop-out of a twist, which I found to be an M. Night Shyamalan-level betrayal of everything genuinely poignant or intriguing about the book that preceded it.

The set-up of Foer's novel is ingeniously simple. Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old Manhattanite, loses his father in the WTC attacks on September 11. In his grief, he discovers a key in his father's closet inside a small envelope with the word "Black" written on it in red ink. Since his father always set challenges for him, Oskar decides in mournful desperation this is one last mystery for him to solve. He sets out to find the lock that matches the key by visiting everyone with the last name of "Black" in the NY metro area. With an unlimited supply of cab fare and a shell-shocked mother who barely seems to notice his comings and goings, he embarks on a quest that takes him to all five boroughs (though, with typical New Yorker chauvinism, never to Jersey).

To me, the brilliance of this concept is that it inherently suggests a gap between the child's point of view and the harshness of reality. Oskar behaves as though he's living in The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but the New York he actually inhabits isn't cute or charming: it's dangerous, a place where terrorists fly airplanes out of a clear blue sky and fucking kill everyone. This reality, telegraphed from the first chapter on, inflects Oskar's imaginings with a kind of manic optimism, a naivete that feels more longed-for than actual: "Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place... that could be extremely useful, because if you're on the ninety-fifth floor and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground," he observes on the third page. Oskar is not just a child, but a child clinging on to childhood, a precarious situation that sets us up with an immediate source of tension. As he rings the doorbells of total strangers, we're frightened not just for his personal safety (though certainly that too), but also for the last scraps of his innocence.

And yet, as we move through the chapters, it becomes, weirdly enough, clearer and clearer that Oskar has nothing to fear -- that his naivete is right on the money and that his fears and distrust are actually what he needs to shed. The Blacks he meets are charmingly gruff at worst, but mostly indie-flick quirky, with life lessons to share. One of them, his upstairs neighbor, a 103 year-old war reporter, even joins him on his quest; the old dude tromps gamely around the city until he dies, out of sight, from health problems that fortunately haven't hindered him from acting as Oskar's sherpa for the last hundred pages. It's his time to go, natch: Oskar bringing him back into the world is "the greatest thing anyone could have done," and now, thanks to the kid, he's finally ready to close up shop.

There's an eerie feeling about the encounters with these Blacks, who seem to spring into existence solely for Oskar's therapeutic benefit: only one of them, a woman he meets at the top of the Empire State Building, is a literal tour guide, but the others are like tour guides too, displaying museums of their lives, relating life philosophies and stories of grief that, curiously, seem to relate directly to Oskar's quest. Some of these interludes are undeniably entertaining -- Sherpa Black's card catalogue system, which sums up the lives of the important (and mostly dead) with one word each ("Who's Marilyn Monroe?" "Sex!") had me laughing out loud. But there's something about the book that reminded me of the profoundly creepy film The Truman Show, even before I reached the end.

I thought it was a question of authorial contrivance, but in fact, this contrivance is part of the plot. All along, you probably thought Mama Schell was dealing with her own grief, losing herself in a new romance, or maybe just getting an eensy bit drunk, but, wise to the little one's plans, she's actually been orchestrating this journey all along! She's phoned each Black in advance, to make sure they had cookies waiting and, presumably, didn't have a criminal record, and she even knows the ultimate solution of the mystery: the second Black he visited called with the big reveal just after he left her house, and good old mom picked up the phone. "My search was a play that Mom had written, and she knew the ending when I was at the beginning," Oskar relates. There was no danger all along.

There's so much that annoys me about this that it's tough to know where to start, but here's the gist: it's not just that this ending retroactively undercuts the dramatic tension of the entire novel. It's that it also simplifies the only other potentially complicated character, Oskar's mother, into just one more good-guy babysitter among many. Even if a lot of her story takes place off the page, a mother so bewildered in the wake of her husband's death that she literally loses track of her son makes for a truly poignant, disturbing, and believable character, and one peculiarly appropriate to a 9/11 novel. After all, in the confusion and despair following the national tragedy, a lot of authority figures in this country seemed to drop the ball on their responsibilities. Instead, Oskar's mother, like everyone else in the book, exists just to heal him, and to keep him "safe."

"Safe" is an important word when describing this novel, and not just because it's the last word in the book. Since the adults here have no driving motivations, take no significant actions, they're about as threatening as imaginary friends. The other part of the story, which I've so far omitted from this summary, has to do with Oskar's grandparents, survivors of the Dresden firebombing. His elective-mute grandpa and his grandma -- who pretends to be blind so she can type a "memoir" of entirely blank pages -- exist in an overlong parable of passivity. They serve entirely as a cautionary tale about how one mustn't be afraid to love, even when one has lost before. (And, like Oskar's mom, they prepare their story intentionally for the edification of their son and grandson, with second person "you" references throughout.) Yet in this part of the story, as in Oskar's, there's something missing: the problem of evil.

This is not what actually happened.

September 11 wasn't an accident; neither was the Dresden firebombing or Hiroshima (also featured here) or for that matter, the Holocaust or the Iraq War. They were awful, cruel, intentionally destructive acts that human beings committed against other human beings. And, although I don't think any novel needs to take a dark view of humankind, I do think that a novel that makes use of these tragedies needs to in some way account for them, to figure them into its picture of the world. In my last post, I wrote about how the adults in a true YA novel can't be fallible, because then the sense of order, necessary for the hero's safe return to the world of childhood, would be thrown out of whack. And in that sense, the primary thing that adults can't be in this novel is angry.

The catastrophes of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close have victims by the truckload: men, women, children, zoo animals. But what they don't have, and what they could never have in the world of this novel, are perpetrators. No one here is violent, or capable of violence. When attacked, these characters turn inward. They become isolated, sad, numb, nostalgic, and then ultimately, they become wise. They don't become militant, and they don't want revenge. Christlike, they endure, and thus, Christlike, they eventually rise from the ashes unscathed and blameless. Their biggest regret is falling out of love with the world and temporarily losing their sense of childlike wonder. Fundamentally selfless, their only hope is that the next generation will learn from their mistakes.

This is an appealing view of human nature, but it's also one that doesn't make any sense in light of the events of the novel -- that is, unless you take the child-narcissist's view. September 11 happened in reality, a mass violence by some people on others that led to misguided retaliation and two wars' worth of gruesome, still-continuing bloodshed. That is unfathomably horrifying, and the questions it raises are unanswerable. But, if like everything else in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, we saw September 11 as something that happened to Oskar Schell to teach him difficult but beautiful truths about life... well, that would make a lot more sense, wouldn't it? As much as it might upset a child to think that God is crying because of something he did, the truth of the matter is even more disturbing: that though the water is rising, the rain doesn't have anything to do with him at all.

For Kids of All Ages, pt. 1: Why A?

I recently read an article in the LA Times online about a phenomenon I posted on back in November: the fact that more now than ever, adults are reading novels and fiction series intended for young adults. Spurred on, I guess, by the worldwide success of titles like Harry Potter and Twilight, readers (and thus publishers) increasingly regard these books as intended for an audience far beyond the too-old-to-nap, too-young-to-drive. My initial response to this, as chronicled in my earlier post, was reflexive snark: adults were trying to escape, rather than encounter a genuinely challenging aesthetic experience, and for that reason the whole scene was a damn shame and I was going to have another beer before going to bed. I see now, though, that this attitude is as vague as it is dismissive. The question I failed to ask then, but that I'm asking now, is, "What is it that makes something a young adult novel, rather than simply a novel about young adults?"

It's probably obvious by looking at my earlier posts that I don't believe that a literary work's success hinges on its subject matter. In my life, I have loved books about everything from unicorns to the apocalypse, and found fault with ones whose heroes run the gamut from magicians to hermaphrodites. I also have loved a lot of books with child or teenage narrators. For several years, my favorite novel of all time was Steven Millhauser's masterful Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, a vision of childhood hallucinatory in its accuracy, purportedly penned by a pre-teen with a Nabokovian vocabulary and a covetous, lonely soul. I already told you how I feel about The Catcher in the Rye, a book all-too-often undervalued by adults precisely because of its appeal to the young. And Huckleberry Finn needs no endorsement from me to demonstrate its self-evident weight and significance (the ending is lousy, though).

These books -- and there are others in their company -- could easily be classified as YA because of their characters and subject matter; the edgy parts of any of the three have nothing on today's reads, where rape, violence, murder, S&M, substance abuse, promiscuous werewolves, pregnancy, and relentless texting are giving parents panic attacks, or driving them to Borders to buy copies of their own. Yet I would argue that, despite the subject matter they chose, Millhauser, Salinger, and Twain's novels are in fact not members of the genre they resemble.  Here's why.

Let me offer, for your consideration, the following theory. The young adult novel is about a flirtation with independence -- a journey that has its roots in the tradition of children's books, akin to the voyages of Max in Where the Wild Things Are or the title character in The Runaway Bunny. In the young adult novel, the protagonist visits the grown-ups' world, but he does not stay: sometimes chastened, sometimes changed, he returns at the end to his childhood for a little longer, usually with a greater appreciation for it now that he knows what's in store. In the young adult novel, there is, beneath all the chaos, a profound faith in order and authority.  Though the protagonist may feel at sea, there is in the end someone -- or Someone -- to take charge, if only he'll let them.

Big Bunny is watching you.

Young adult novels can do beautiful, brilliant things: Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a delight, for example. But there are two things they cannot do (and this goes for young adult movies too). First, they can't intelligently and honestly investigate the inner lives of their older characters; this would make these folks incarnate, fallible, and as such would undercut the whole enterprise, like seeing Jesus on the toilet (eww). Second, as much as they may imbue their teen or child characters with precocious wisdom, this wisdom must always have clear limits, beyond which adult authority endlessly stretches. The child narrator, regardless of his worries or his crimes, must always lack some essential perspective that, when finally grasped at the end, returns him to his rightful place in kid-dom.

The thing that makes a book about a young person part of adult literature, in my opinion, is that the protagonist in question knows just as much, if not more, about what is going on than the adults surrounding him do; that he, in fact, is pointing out truths about grown-up culture that grown-ups can't or won't face. When, given a choice between submitting to what he believes is divine law and following his own judgment, Huck Finn actually rejects God ("All right, then, I'll go to Hell"), he also marks the novel that contains him as a whole different kind of journey than the roundtrip represented by the children's stories noted above. In adult books about children, the child-characters ultimately face the potentially terrifying reality that no one knows what the hell they're doing, that the world is unjust, that some mistakes cannot be undone, and that nobody but Nobody is in charge. They may wish they could relinquish their independence in the end, but there's no going back. They can't rewind the tape.

This is all a long way of leading into what I'm going to talk about in my next post, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a highly original, tenderly poignant, inventively constructed book that I would nevertheless place squarely in the genre of the Young Adult Novel. The book fascinated me for a number of reasons, but perhaps most of all because of what I saw as the schism between the reach of its formal ambition and the thematically inhibited, even precious way it approached certain questions of character, death, and survival. I have many more thoughts on it, but for the time being just let me say it's well worth a read, even if it has some growing up to do. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be watching the Muppet Show.

Peter Pan in Barnes & Noble

When I was growing up, I read indiscriminately.  I read choose-your-own-adventure novels.  I read R. L. Stine.  I read cautionary tales about steroid use, unplanned pregnancies, eating disorders, drunk driving, and date rape.  I read sci-fi, fantasy, ghost stories, biographies, collections of famous quotes, screenplays, and newspaper comics.  When I went out to dinner with my parents -- which was often, since neither of them like to cook -- I always had a book with me; sometimes I brought two, as if the restaurant meal was a long flight or a subway ride to Coney Island.  I read in the car, nausea be damned.  I read when I couldn't sleep and I read when I first woke up.  I did not like everything I read, and sometimes I started a book I didn't finish, but for the most part, my relationship to books was an uncritical one.  I read nearly everything I could get my hands on.

Although I may have been an extreme case, I don't think this kind of behavior is uncommon in children, especially not the lonely ones.  Books (and their modern descendents in the Kindle and the Sony Reader) are like doors to Narnia that you can fit inside your Hello Kitty purse or the kangaroo pouch in the front of a hooded sweatshirt.  And, like portable doors, they do more than just open inward; they also shut the world out.  As Brock Clarke points out in his novel An Arsonist's Guide to Homes in New England: "...maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands, and therefore not pity them and leave them alone."

Living as I do in New York, I see people reading almost every day, on the subway or the bus, and much of the reading I see reflects a similar attitude of escape.  But there's a difference.  Though as a child I read very many bad books (the Goosebumps cover of Say Cheese and Die! springs to mind, with its Polaroid photograph of a skeleton family on vacation), and I generally didn't care about their mediocrity, even when it was pointed out to me by older readers or authority figures, I also read those books in a spirit of genuine curiosity.  In Writing Past Dark, author Bonnie Friedman describes on an occasion when she, a friend, and a friend's mother went to see a movie about a young understudy trying to make it big.  At the very beginning, the friend's mother remarked that the leading lady would, no doubt, break her leg right before the big performance, giving the heroine her chance.  Bonnie Friedman describes her surprise and confusion, as a child, when that prediction came true, then points out that she can no longer remember what it was like not to know the leading lady would break her leg -- such ignorance/innocence is gone from her forever.  But many of the readers I see on public transportation or elsewhere are long past the point of losing this innocence, and yet the titles they choose don't reflect this seismic inner change.

Here's my point: parents' and teachers' complaints over vampire romances, Harry Potter, Gossip Girl, etc., are often squelched with the retort that "at least the kids are reading," the attitude being that reading something is better than reading nothing.  I wholeheartedly agree with this refutation: reading books, even trashy books – especially trashy books – is an essential part of learning the conventions and mechanics of fiction and nonfiction.  But, over the last few years, I've noticed what I think is a disturbing trend in the opposite direction, toward adults reading either books intended for children or, at any rate, at the same level as books intended for children, and justifying it by the same logic: "Well, at least I'm reading."

Pulps have always been a part of the American publishing landscape, and I don't think there's anything wrong with guilty pleasures (hey, I used to watch the Anna Nicole show when it was on television).  But when we start behaving as though our guilty pleasures are good for us – that munching potato chips is akin to eating our vegetables – I think the world of literature is really in trouble.  Reading a schlocky romance about teenage werewolves may teach you a lot at age eleven, but at age thirty-one, it is to my mind far less intellectually "good for you" than even a great many TV commercials, in that it simply reinforces your existing assumptions. When we start seeing the act of reading at any age as virtuous in itself, regardless of content, we refuse to grow up, to own our knowledge and take on the responsibility of expanding it.  And thus, we act like babies.