Read This: Rage & #YAsaves
Under most circumstances, if a friend of mine had their novel as a featured book in an essay for a nationally prominent publication like the Wall Street Journal, I’d be ecstatic for them. Unfortunately, Meghan Cox Gurdon decided to use Jackie Morse Kessler’s Rage, about a 16-year-old girl who is recruited to become the personification of War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as an example of the “depravity” of contemporary YA fiction, suggesting that Jackie’s “gruesome but inventive take on a girl’s struggle with self-injury” is a type of novel that might actually do teenage girls who read it harm. “It is also possible—indeed, likely,” Gurdon claims, “that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”
Plenty of people took on Gurdon’s larger argument—somebody should do something about all these wicked, wicked books, and if publishers won’t stop foisting them on us, parents should take steps to keep them out of teens’ hands—over the weekend. One point that was made over and over again on Twitter (under the #YAsaves hashtag) is that novels like Jackie’s, or Cheryl Rainfield’s Scars, or Lauren Myracle’s Shine—among others singled out by Gurdon—can let teens who are enduring horrific levels of adversity in their lives know that they are not alone, that hope is still an option. As Linda Holmes points out in her essay for NPR’s pop culture blog, “While the WSJ piece refers to the YA fiction view of the world as a funhouse mirror, I fear that what’s distorted is the vision of being a teenager that suggests kids don’t know pathologies like suicide or abuse unless they read about them in books… A lot of kids who don’t experience abusive dating relationships or self-harm or eating disorders? They already know somebody who does.”
I wonder what it means that Gurdon is horrified by the scenes that Jackie writes about a teenager who believes that cutting herself is the most effective way to retain control over her emotional life, but she doesn’t have anything to say about the scenes where that girl witnesses firsthand the effects of war on an unnamed desert nation. (Jackie also contrasts intimate and large-scale trauma in Hunger, the predecessor to Rage, in which an anorexic girl assumes the role of Famine.) Maybe it’s useful to think about how much suffering many of us are willing to shrug our shoulders at, whether in resigned acquiescence or apathy, as long as it’s not showing up on our own doorsteps. As long as we don’t have to see it too often on the TV, or read too much about it in the papers. But when we try to push those tragedies out of our line of sight, what other pain, closer to home, are we obscuring?
I couldn’t tell you for sure that’s what’s going on in this backlash against “dark” YA fiction; in all likelihood, there are lots of contributing factors, all tangled together in people’s minds. What I do know is that writers like Jackie are using fantasy to tell us about the pain and suffering they recognize in the world—and other authors, like Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why) or Lizabeth Scott (Living Dead Girl) aren’t even couching it in fantasy. And while the fantasy sequences of Hunger and Rage are entertaining, when these novels focus directly on their protagonists’ traumas, they aren’t comfortable reading, not in the slightest. But what they describe is real, and even if it’s not something we are experiencing or witnessing in our own lives, we should be paying attention, and learning how to effectively support the people who are experiencing it when we do encounter them. Because, as Linda Holmes points out, it’s very likely that we will encounter them, and we may not always know exactly what to do, but we can try not to be completely ignorant. And for those readers who are in all too capable a position to judge these stories on their accuracy, they can (at their best) serve as a powerful lifeline.
7 June 2011 | read this |
Read This: The Borrower
Last week, while I was interviewing authors at BookExpo America, my latest Shelf Awareness review ran—and it’s a change of pace from my usual science fiction/fantasy fare. Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel, The Borrower, is the sort of story which, had it been published ten years ago, or even five, might have been unironically published as “chick lit.” Or maybe not: Makkai has a three-year consecutive streak of appearing in the Best American Short Stories anthologies, so she could easily be positioned in the same literary matrix in which authors like Curtis Sittenfeld have flourished. As it is, there’s both literary and commercial potential here, which is why I wound up describing The Borrower as “a young woman’s ‘dramedy’ in the vein of early Jennifer Weiner or Marian Keyes.
Early on, there are hints that it might even be an issue-oriented commercial novel à la Jodi Picoult, as Makkai introduces us to Lucy Hull, a twenty-something children’s librarian in a Missouri town who discovers that the parents of one of her regular patrons have enrolled him in a fundamentalist program that promises to cure teenage and pre-adolescent boys of homosexual tendencies. The library is one of the few sources of solace in ten-year-old Ian’s life, especially since Lucy eagerly fuels his love for children’s literature that draws his mother’s scorn for not having “the breath of God in them.” (There is a lot of namechecking of kid’s books along the way, constantly reinforcing Lucy’s coolness—and, by extension, Makkai’s.) The situation escalates when Lucy comes in to work one morning and finds Ian hiding in the library after having run away from home; somehow, this leads to her driving him out of Missouri, first to her parents’ apartment in Chicago and then to various points further east.
But while the issue of Ian’s “escape” never completely fades away, the emphasis shifts towards Lucy’s psychological state. This has its advantages; the more time we dwell on Lucy’s quarterlife crisis, the less time we have to think about the utter implausibility of the “kidnapping” plot, especially the ways in which that trouble never actually catches up with Lucy. (This is particularly unrealistic given that, early in their flight, they run into the guy she’s sort of seeing, who she then proceeds to dump, and he goes back to Missouri and never says a word to anybody about seeing Ian with her.) At the same time, there’s always just enough attention paid to Ian’s dilemma to keep Lucy from coming across as too self-absorbed, and Makkai does a good job of keeping Lucy’s concern about Ian’s emotional well-being from turning into overt Christian-bashing. Or, at least, doing it with self-deprecating humor: “Obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis,” Lucy reflects after one conversation, “was maybe not my finest moment.”
Yes, the well-read young librarian vs. Christian fundamentalist parents setup is a bit too easy, but it’s not as if one comes to that premise expecting a balanced social critique. As an affirmation of liberal, book-loving values, though, Makkai creates what I described in my review as “an entertaining imaginary space.” It’s a bit uneven: Sometimes the literary “playfulness” of things like Lucy’s reframing of her situation in various modes of children’s literature gets in the way of the story; sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, the suspension of disbelief wavers. When it works, though, The Borrower is a strong enough debut that I’m definitely curious to see where Makkai goes next.
1 June 2011 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
