Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  What to call these new departments—and the more sophisticated literature they might stock—excited considerable discussion. For example, another speaker, the writer Francesca Lia Block, suggested the term X-Over to describe the department’s multigenerational, crossover appeal, the same appeal that her category-denying Weetzie Bat novels had excited among both teens and readers in their twenties.

  Whatever it might be called, as Anna Lawrence-Pietroni (1996, 34) had written in that landmark issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, “Young adult fiction defies easy categorization, and by its nature proposes a more liberating view of genre as process rather than as circumspection and definition.” Block seemed to echo this view at the YALSA program: “Society is beginning to understand that childhood and adulthood are not really as separate as people think they are… . Childhood is filled with darkness, the need for love, the search for acceptance. Why can’t we create a category which all the barriers will cross? This is the intention in bookstores and libraries: books that appeal to young and old, gay and straight, open-minded and representative of different racial backgrounds. Maybe we can begin here to use literature as a way to connect rather than to divide.”

  The issue, however, was not so much what such a new, free-ranging category of literature might be called or could offer in the way of connections but how it might be created, published, marketed, and sold. In 1992, the editor and publisher Stephen Roxburgh, then still at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, had written, “Publishing, in order to work, has to fit into boxes. One has to be clear on whether the publishing strategy for a title is adult or YA. A book’s primary support, in terms of advertising and the review media must be defined” (Lodge 1992, 38).

  Because of the undefined composition of her multigenerational readership, Block acknowledged that most readers found her books by word of mouth. Speaking to the same issue in her address, Parker suggested, “We need to see more book reviewing and advertising done on MTV and in the magazines that teens actually look at: Seventeen, Savvy, and Spin. I don’t think YA is dead. I think it’s changed and we must change with it.”

  Some strategies for change that were suggested during the program included the cross-promotion of titles by listing them in both children’s and adult catalogs, as Houghton Mifflin had done with David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work. The literary agent George Nicholson, another speaker, offered the model of Robert Cormier’s novel Fade, with which he had been involved when he was publisher of books for young readers at Dell/Delacorte. This most ambitious of Cormier’s books was published, he explained, in both adult and young adult editions and was listed in both catalogs. Another possibility broached was the publication of adult paperback editions of more sophisticated YA titles, as had been done with Fade, Walter Dean Myers’s Fallen Angels, and A. M. Homes’s Jack.

  By program’s end, the panel had carved out an ambitious agenda that publisher Andre Schiffrin seemed to be describing in another context (the venturesome creation of his nonprofit company the New Press): “We would need,” he wrote in American Bookseller, “to show that audiences deemed unreachable [think sixteen-to twenty-five-year-olds here] by many publishers will respond to materials and formats designed to reach them. The search for new audiences is, of course, as essential to the future of the bookstore as it is to that of publishers. We hope to be increasingly successful at finding new ways to reach those readers with meaningful, affordable books” (Schiffrin 1995, 17).

  Hope keeps dreams alive, of course, but much of what the panelists were calling for seemed, at the time, to be just such a dream—and an impossible one at that, given the rapidly changing world of publishing. The traditional model of the private, often family-owned, small company had morphed, through relentless mergers and acquisitions, into a new model: the multinational, publicly held, infotainment conglomerate. According to a 1997 special issue of the Nation, one of eight such behemoths (Hearst, News Corporation, Pearson, Viacom, Advance Publications, Bertelsmann, Time Warner, and Holtzbrinck) owned virtually every publisher in America. Many of these were headed by a new kind of executive “brought in, often from finance or banking, with a commitment to their new owners (international media conglomerates) to increase profits, which now are gauged against those of other conglomerate holdings” (which were often television and motion picture companies) (Schiffrin 1995, 17).

  This constant pressure to perform resulted in the increased commodification of books, publishers’ focus on the next hot new property to be exploited. Morgan Entrekin, of Grove/Atlantic, one of the few surviving independents, said, “Nowadays, there is a burning impatience to find the next big hit, to pigeonhole authors and books in easy categories. The large corporations that control American publishing care more about product than prose” (Getlin 1997, E5).

  The massive size of publishing operations further encouraged the status quo rather than the sort of experimentations that the YALSA panel had called for. Imagine asking a giant ocean liner to turn on a dime, and you have a good idea of the condition of American publishing in the late nineties. And as publishing grew, so did the noninstitutional market. By 1997 Barnes & Noble operated more than a thousand stores (454 superstores and 559 smaller mall outlets), and retail outlets controlled 85 percent of the market (Campbell 1997).

  And yet progress did continue to be made. For example, another important advance took place in 1995, when the National Book Foundation reestablished a long-moribund category for its prestigious National Book Award: a prize for the most distinguished book of the year for young readers. The first award, presented in 1996, went to the young adult novel Parrot in the Oven, by the California writer Victor Martinez. In the succeeding six years, the award would go four times to a young adult book (the remaining two were awarded to children’s titles). Two years later, recognizing the increasing artistic sophistication of young adult literature, the Los Angeles Times added the category “Young Adult Novel” to its roster of annual book awards. The founding judges—Patty Campbell, Selma Lanes, and myself—selected Joan Bauer’s wonderfully funny and heartfelt Rules of the Road as the first recipient of the major new award.

  Inarguably, however, the most important of the new YA literary prizes would be YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award, which was created in 1999 and presented for the first time in 2000. I have more to say about the creation of this new award for a new millennium and its far-reaching significance later in this chapter.

  A Renaissance of Youth Culture

  It was clear by the mid-1990s that there was “a renaissance of youth culture in this country” (Bernstein 1996, 25). This was, once again, a largely market-driven phenomenon, rooted in the extraordinary growth of this segment of the population, which would grow by 4.5 million between 1990 and 2000 (a 17 percent increase). Record numbers of students were enrolled in U.S. schools in 1996 and 1997, with “the bulk of the increase at the high school level,” according to the U.S. Department of Education. “From the fall of 1997 through 2007, the nation’s schools can expect a thirteen percent increase in grades nine through twelve” (American Library Association Washington Office Newsline 1977, 73).

  That this record number of young people commanded record amounts of disposable income was catnip to the American marketplace. According to the New York Times, “In 1995 people between 13 and 19 spent $68.8 billion on personal items, up from $49.8 billion in 1985. ‘The teen market has got tremendous buying power and is growing by leaps and bounds,’ said Page Thompson, the head of United States Media at the ad agency DDB Needham. ‘If you take a look down the line, four or five years from now, it’s going to be huge. Long term, it’s a bonanza’” (Pogrebin 1996, C8).

  Seldom in our history had so much attention been lavished on teens, who now seemed omnipresent, not only in America’s malls and gallerias but also in every medium of popular culture: magazines, movies, television, and more.

  Among magazines, Teen People debuted to much fanfare in 1998 and quickly became second only to the venerable Seventee
n magazine in its popularity (Teen and YM rounded out the big-four magazines for this demographic). CosmoGirl followed in 1999 and Elle Girl and Teen Vogue in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Oddly there have been no general interest magazines for boys with the possible exception of MH-18, which debuted in 2000 but folded in less than a year. There have, however, been a number of special interest magazines for boys including Thrasher, Transworld Skateboarding, and Game Pro.

  If no single director dominated teen-oriented motion pictures in the nineties as John Hughes had in the eighties, movies continued to capture the teen zeitgeist, none more cleverly than two 1995 releases: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. The former, according to Time magazine, “is about conspicuous consumption: wanting, having and wearing in style,” whereas the latter telegraphs its message when a character walks into the mall that is the film’s setting and exclaims, “I love the smell of commerce in the morning” (Corliss 1995b, 77–78).

  Television began its increasingly single-minded focus on teens in 1989 with the series Saved by the Bell (followed in 1993 by Saved by the Bell: The New Class). The trash classic Beverly Hills 90210 followed in 1990. In 1992 MTV launched its hugely popular and influential series The Real World (which still airs today and has become the network’s longest-running series). My So-Called Life and Party of Five debuted in 1994, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clueless followed in 1996. Meanwhile, in 1995, the teen-oriented WB television network launched and, within five years, had become home to such blockbuster teen-centric series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, Charmed, Roswell, Popular, and Angel. “In network TV, WB defines hot because (1) its audience is young, (2) it’s the only network to make solid ratings gains this past season, and (3) its audience is young,” the television critic Rick Kushman (1999, G1) noted sardonically. The most critically acclaimed of all the youth-oriented series, Freaks and Geeks, came along at the very end of the decade, in 1999, a year when eighteen of the thirty-six new shows starred people in their teens or early twenties (Kushman 1999).

  According to Time, “The economics alone don’t explain the high school vogue, nor why the shows include a couple of the fall’s better premieres. ‘Adolescence is a great period of time to write about,’ says Jason Katims, creator of the acclaimed “Relativity.” ‘It’s where so much of you is formed and the themes that will follow you your whole adult life are born’ ” (Poniewozik 1999, 77–78).

  Publishers already knew this, of course, and were publishing not only books for adolescents but also a new genre of books—for adult readers—about adolescents. One of the first of these was Grace Palladino’s lively and informative Teenagers: An American History (1996). Another important title—and one that would be widely imitated—was journalist Patricia Hersch’s moving and unsparing A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence (Fawcett Columbine, 1998); Hersch, the mother of four adolescent boys, spent three years in the company of eight other teenagers in Reston, Virginia.2 William Finnegan’s Cold New World was a sobering look at adolescent alienation and impoverishment (Random House, 1998), and Peter Zollo’s Wise Up to Teens: Insights into Marketing and Advertising to Teenagers (New Strategist, 1999) examined the lives and consuming interests of more privileged teens, as did Don Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital (McGraw-Hill, 1998), which profiled the emergence of the “net” generation.

  No longer limited to the traditional twelve-to eighteen-year-old demographic, this new culture embraced young adults as old as thirty, giving shape and form to the previously amorphous Weetzie Bat readership and acknowledging the growing commercial and cultural influence of the MTV demographic. Booksellers were starting to call this group the alternative audience, and a number of venturesome small presses—Last Gasp, Serpent’s Tail, City Lights, Manic D—were starting to publish quirky, offbeat titles for them. Significantly, the phenomenon was not limited to major urban centers. “In the suburbs kids are absolutely starving for, and fanatical about, anything that is weird, funky, extreme,” publisher Katherine Gates told Publishers Weekly. “Also don’t forget that books are the current required accessories of hipdom, the way CDs used to be” (Bernstein 1996, 26). As a result, such “hip” outlets as Tower Records and Virgin Atlantic began to carry books for these wired and with-it young readers right alongside their staple music products.

  The Advent of the Edgy

  All of the elements I’ve been discussing breathed new life into the nearly moribund YA genre, sparking a rapid and energetic recovery from its near-death experience. With a newly expanded reader demographic and a new retail marketplace in which to reach them, publishers began issuing a newly hard-edged and gritty fiction of realism that targeted a crossover readership. Quickly dubbed “bleak books,” the new subgenre excited considerable discussion and even more controversy.

  The movies had anticipated this turn to darkness in 1995 and 1996 with such landmark noir films as Larry Clark’s horrifying Kids (with a screenplay by teenager Harmony Korine) and—from Britain—Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (based on the sensationally popular novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh).

  As the New York Times critic Jon Pareles (1995, sec. 2, 1) correctly noted, “ ’Kids’ is, for now, the most extreme of a long line of films in which teens are amoral, irrational, hormone-crazed and oblivious to consequences.”

  Bellwether book titles in this new genre began appearing in 1997, including Brock Cole’s The Facts Speak for Themselves (Front Street), Norma Fox Mazer’s When She Was Good (Levine/Scholastic), Robert Cormier’s Tenderness (Delacorte), Han Nolan’s Dancing on the Edge (Harcourt, Brace), and Adam Rapp’s The Buffalo Tree (Front Street). Not only was the content of these books newly sophisticated (subjects ranged from pedophilia to insanity, murder, rape, juvenile incarceration, and serial slaying); so, also, was the physical design of the books. Publishers Weekly took notice of this in the article “Hipper, Brighter, and Bolder” (Stevenson 1997), which acknowledged the importance of the new retail market (which also included the online retailers Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, both of which would create new, separate teen sections at their websites in 1998—and the competition there for the attention of YA consumers). In the same spirit, the editor and publisher Arthur Levine told me in an interview, “It’s first of all important to pay careful attention to the dust jacket art in order to excite all of your potential audiences” (Cart 1997, 553).

  While all this dynamic activity was happening, libraries remained a staple—though slightly diminished—market for these books, and the institutional world was actually the first to acknowledge the changes sweeping the YA world—for good or for ill. In fact, one of the very first strands of spirited discussion on the newly created electronic book discussion forum YALSA-BK was “Bleak Books.” Soon thereafter, Booklist magazine’s children’s books editor, Ilene Cooper, wrote a thoughtful article, “Facts of Life,” about Cole’s The Facts Speak for Themselves and followed this with “Publishing on the Edge,” coauthored with the YA books editor Stephanie Zvirin. At the 1998 ALA conference, Booklist sponsored the important panel discussion “On the Edge: Personal Perspectives on Writing for Today’s Young Adults.” The speakers included the authors Brock Cole, Annette Curtis Klause, Norma Fox Mazer, and Han Nolan, and the editor Richard Jackson, the publisher of the controversial bleak book by Virginia Walter, Making Up Megaboy, the story of a suburban white California teen who inexplicably murders a Korean shopkeeper.

  The eloquent Jackson (1998, 1985) put the entire controversy in perspective: “When reviewers today worry about bleak stories, they are worrying, on behalf of the audience, about the readiness of young readers to face life’s darkest corners. But in America there are kids living in those dark corners, and they need our attention as much as the feisty, pert, athletic, and popular youth so reassuring to adults. Even children in the sun will enter the darkness. They all need our tenderness. And we need our tenderness as art inspires us to feel it.”

  This should have been
the last word on this controversy, but there would be many more to come as the mainstream media belatedly discovered the debate, and a yearlong spate of increasingly sensational stories about this “new” trend in publishing began appearing. The media hubbub seems to have started with an article that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on August 2, 1998. Written by Sara Mosle and titled “The Outlook’s Bleak,” the article was a hand-wringing account of the eruption of edgy young adult novels that were offering unsparingly dark looks at the lives of contemporary teens. By reading bleak books, Mosle argued, teens were growing old before their time, “shouldering burdens far beyond their years.”

  And so they were—but not because they were reading young adult books. Rather, it was because they themselves were a generation at risk. The first edition of this book was chockablock with statistics demonstrating that reality. This time around it is sufficient to quote Thomas A. Jacobs (1997, 39), who— in his book What Are My Rights? 95 Questions and Answers about Teens and the Law—wrote, “In the Forties the top discipline problems in school were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, and not putting trash in the wastebaskets. In the Nineties, the top problem [was] alcohol and drug abuse, followed by pregnancy, suicide, rape, assault, arson, murder, vandalism, and gang fights.”