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BOOKS READING BETWEEN THE LINES.

JUNE 5 2014 2:49 PM

Against YA
Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what
you’re reading was written for children.
By Ruth Graham

Illustration by Liana Finck.

A
s The Fault in Our Stars barrels into theaters this weekend virtually
guaranteed to become a blockbuster, it can be hard to remember that once
upon a time, an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading the
novel that inspired it. Not because it is bad—it isn’t—but because it was written for
teenagers.

RUTH GRAHAM

Ruth Graham is a regular Slate c ontributor. She live s in New Hampshire.

The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-
adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of
teen novels with pride. There are endless lists of YA novels that adults should read,
an “I read YA” campaign for grown-up YA fans, and confessional posts by adult YA
addicts. But reading YA doesn’t make for much of a confession these days: A 2012
survey by a market research firm found that 55 percent of these books are bought by
people older than 18. (The definition of YA is increasingly fuzzy, but it generally
refers to books written for 12- to 17-year-olds. Meanwhile, the cultural definition of
“young adult” now stretches practically to age 30, which may have something to do
with this whole phenomenon.)

The largest group of buyers in that survey—accounting for a whopping 28 percent of

all YA sales—are between ages 30 and 44. That’s my demographic, which might be
why I wasn’t surprised to hear this news. I’m surrounded by YA-loving adults, both in
real life and online. Today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is worldly and adult-
worthy. That has kept me bashful about expressing my own fuddy-duddy opinion:
Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.

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Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one
defends as serious literature. I’m talking about the genre the publishing industry calls
“realistic fiction.” These are the books, like The Fault in Our Stars, that are about real
teens doing real things, and that rise and fall not only on the strength of their stories
but, theoretically, on the quality of their writing. These are the books that could
plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers. And
that’s a shame.

The Fault in Our Stars is the most obvious juggernaut, but it’s not the only YA book for
which adults (and Hollywood) have gone crazy. Coming to theaters later this
summer is If I Stay, based on Gayle Forman’s recent novel about a teenage girl in
a coma. And DreamWorks just announced it bought the rights to Eleanor & Park,
Rainbow Rowell’s outcast romance that Kirkus Reviews said “will captivate teen and
adult readers alike.” Before these there were the bestsellers (and movies) The Perks
of Being a Wallflower and It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

Adult fans of these books declare confidently that YA is more sophisticated than ever.
This kind of thing is hard to quantify, though I will say that my own life as a YA reader
way back in the early 1990s was hardly wanting for either satisfaction or
sophistication. Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of
the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and re-
read them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that
today, I am a different reader.
I’m a reader who did not weep, contra every article ever written about the book,
when I read The Fault in Our Stars. I thought, Hmm, that’s a nicely written book for 13-
year-olds. If I’m being honest, it also left me saying “Oh, brother” out loud more than
once. Does this make me heartless? Or does it make me a grown-up? This is, after all,
a book that features a devastatingly handsome teen boy who says things like “I’m in
love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of
saying true things” to his girlfriend, whom he then tenderly deflowers on a European
vacation he arranged.

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That will sound harsh to these characters’ legions of ardent fans. But even the
myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to
do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia. As the writer Jen Doll, who
used to have a column called “YA for Grownups,” put it in an essay last year, “At its
heart, YA aims to be pleasurable.”

Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort in The Fault in Our Stars.

Photo by James Bridges/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is
pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think
Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present
the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA
readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the
trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature
insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults. When
chapter after chapter in Eleanor & Park ends with some version of “He’d never get
enough of her,” the reader seems to be expected to swoon. But how can a grown-up,
even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that
teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA
endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or
cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral
ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.
These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes
married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting
endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with “likable”
protagonists.

Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better
than this. I know, I know: Live and let read. Far be it from me to disrupt the “everyone
should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like” ethos of our era. There’s room
for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the
serious reader. And if people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching
Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting
maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are
missing something.

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The heroine of The Fault in Our Stars finds messy, unresolved stories unacceptably
annoying. Her favorite book ends mid-sentence, which drives her to try and learn the
story’s “real” ending from its author: “I know it’s a very literary decision and
everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is
something to recommend a story that ends.” True enough, and appropriate to the
character, who finds the uncertainty of her own near future maddening. But mature
readers also find satisfaction of a more intricate kind in stories that confound and
discomfit, and in reading about people with whom they can’t empathize at all. A few
months ago I read the very literary novel Submergence, which ends with a death so
shattering it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. (If it's actually a death!
Adult novels often embrace ambiguity.)* But it also offers so much more: Weird facts,
astonishing sentences, deeply unfamiliar (to me) characters, and big ideas about
time and space and science and love. I’ve also gotten purer plot-based highs recently
from books by Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton, whose age and canonhood have
not stopped them from feeling fresh, true, and surprising. Life is so short, and the list
of truly great books for adults is so long.

Top Comment
I am a retired librarian and I am fascinated and instructed by the comments your article has
earned in librarian listservs—especially those of Young Adult librarians. More...
-atibamanii

3.2k Comments Join In

I do not begrudge young adults themselves their renaissance of fiction. I want

teenagers and ambitious pre-teens to have as many wonderful books to read as
possible, including books about their own lives. But I remember, when I was a young
adult, being desperate to earn my way into the adult stacks; I wouldn’t have wanted
to live in a world where all the adults were camped out in mine. There’s a special
reward in that feeling of stretching yourself beyond the YA mark, akin to the
excitement of graduating out of the kiddie pool and the rest of the padded trappings
of childhood: It’s the thrill of growing up. But the YA and “new adult” boom may
mean fewer teens aspire to grown-up reading, because the grown-ups they know
are reading their books. When I think about what I learned about love, relationships,
sex, trauma, happiness, and all the rest—you know, life—from the extracurricular
reading I did in high school, I think of John Updike and Alice Munro and other
authors whose work has only become richer to me as I have grown older, and which
never makes me roll my eyes.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Shailene Woodley, the 22-year-old star of this
weekend’s big YA-based film. “Last year, when I made Fault, I could still empathize
with adolescence,” she told New York magazine this week, explaining why she is
finished making teenage movies. “But I’m not a young adult anymore—I’m a
woman.”

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Update, July 8, 2014: This post has been updated to clarify that the end of the
novel Submergence, like the end of many adult novels, is ambiguous.
 BOOKS READING BETWEEN THE LINES.

JULY 8 2016 11:00 AM

Ben Lerner Doesn’t Hate Poetry

His new treatise The Hatred of Poetry is actually a very effective defense of
the form.
By Katy Waldman

The “meteorological phenomenon known as virga, my favorite kind of weather: streaks of

water or ice particles trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they reach the ground."
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photo by Kichigin/Thinkstock.

“I, too, dislike it.” Inevitably Ben Lerner’s slim book The Hatred of Poetry begins with
the opening salvo from Marianne Moore’s 1967 poem “Poetry,” which conveyed (in
four crisp, if pointedly clumsy, lines) her “perfect contempt” for the art. “I, too, dislike
it”: Lerner writes that he intones the motto as he fires up his laptop or introduces a
guest at a reading or scrawls a lustrous old name across his classroom’s chalkboard.
His confession is good strategy, an attempt to assure the unwashed masses that the
 author is unpretentious and beer-summit–able, never mind his critically acclaimed
fiction and poetic calling. (He’s penned three verse collections alongside his novels
Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04.) “I, too, dislike it.” At one point, he calls the
words “a kind of manic, mantric affirmation.” Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.

But despite its reception as an act of high-wire trolling, Lerner’s 86-page essay
makes one thing abundantly clear: He loves poetry. Not only that, he loves poems—a
much messier proposition. For Lerner explains poetry’s unpopularity in terms not of
exclusiveness or obscurity, but of misguided expectations: Poetry, having promised
the unfallen euphony of the spheres, is condemned to deliver poems, scraps wrought
by mortal hands from busted-up language. Or, as Lerner puts it:

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence

and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. … But as soon as you move from that impulse

to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your

verses can defeat time … but when you wake, … you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws
CONTINUE READING
and logic.

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