by Michael Cart
So my name is Steve Nugent. I’m just seventeen. It was my birthday last month, in November. Now it’s the middle of December, and the trees around here are caked in ice and sort of silvery in that creepy, wintry way, so right now seventeen seems like a hundred years off. (Rapp 2004, 1)
At night the sky glows purple like the light from a TV when a VCR movie is done playing. And the stars get so big they look like knives coming at you. Some of them stars look like spaceships, too. Especially them blue ones.
It would be cool if one of them blue stars came and a spaceman lit up his insides and showed us his moon bones. . . . Them spacemen probably got stronger hearts than humans, too, cuz they don’t got no pit bull worries or no money suit worries or no Bob Motley worries. All them worries make your heart small, and the smaller your heart the less it glows. (Rapp 2003, 96)
There’s a new subdivision going up and the rain makes the houses look like they were dropped out of the sky.
Nobody lives here yet. It’s all piles of bricks and skeleton wood.
From the cab of the bulldozer I can see into the half-made house. It’s all skinny wood and chicken wire. I think that houses have bones too.
I wonder when they put the walls in cause the walls are skin.
I wonder how electricity works cause electricity’s like veins. Trying to figure this out makes me sleepy. (Rapp 2002, 89)
In a wonderful way, Adam Rapp resembles Maurice Sendak in his outrage at a world that often fails, abuses, and exploits its young. In his recent appreciation of Sendak, Making Mischief, Gregory Maguire (2009, 68) identifies the artist’s “steady and unflagging creed: The weak and lowly are not to be abused.”
As was Sendak, Rapp is an inveterate risk taker and fearless truth teller in dramatizing this creed, and so his work is controversial and no stranger to the censor. But anyone who cares about kids—whether they’re named Jack and Guy or Blacky or Steve—needs to be a champion for this work, just as Rapp (and Sendak) are champions for their characters.
Attention must be paid; truth must be told. And that is Rapp’s creed:
Ma always says, No matter how hard it is you gotta tell the truth, Blacky. No matter how hard. (Rapp 2002, 75)
I don’t mean to be weird P but in your letter you said how you wanted the truth about stuff even if it’s ugly and trust me it’s going to get a little ugly. (Rapp 2009, 3)
The truth can be ugly, but the unflagging love that Rapp shows again and again for his characters, inviting his readers to love them, too, even if the world sometimes doesn’t, is beautiful.
In Punkzilla, Rapp’s eponymous protagonist receives a letter from a girl named Jenny. In it she writes of her boyfriend Branson, “He cries sometimes when nobody’s looking, like when he’s in the bathroom or hiding behind a car, and that’s why I know his soul has gold in it. And your’s [sic] does too, Zilla. Your’s has gold and silver.”
And so, I venture to say, has Rapp’s.
If only there were more space, I would give attention to other writers whose unsparing honesty and courageous convictions have given faces and stories to young adults in jeopardy—writers like Laurie Halse Anderson, Brock Cole, Carolyn Coman, E. R. Frank, Chris Lynch, and Han Nolan. But for now, I can only acknowledge their considerable contributions with appreciation and admiration and move on to our next chapter.
Notes
1. CCBC, “The Cooperative Children’s Book Center,” www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc.
2. The CCBC does not include paperback or other series books targeted at the mass market in its statistics. Otherwise, these numbers would be much larger.
3. Every two years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conduct the National Risk Behavior survey, which monitors health-risk behaviors among ninth-to twelfth-grade students. For specifics, see www.cdc.gov/yrbss.
4. Not so many years ago, after I had finished booktalking nearly one hundred new YA novels to an audience of librarians and teachers, one of the few men present asked an agonized question: “Aren’t there any YA books that present positive father figures?” It was, I acknowledged, a very good question.
5. In 2006 nearly six thousand young people ages ten to twenty-four were murdered, an average of sixteen each day.
6. National Center for Injury and Control, www.cdc.gov/injury.
7. University of Michigan Health System, www.med.umich.edu.
8. AAP Policy, “Policy Statement,” http://aappolicy.aappublications.org /cgi/content/full/ pediatrics;108/5/1222.
9. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Injury Prevention and Control: Violence Prevention,” www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention.
10. It remains an excellent source; its website is at www.safeyouth.org.
11. National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center, “Bullying Facts and Statistics,” www.safeyouth.org/scripts/faq/bullying.asp.
sex and other
shibboleths
YA Comes of Age—and Not a Moment Too Soon
It’s possible to view the history of young adult literature as a series of inspired exercises in iconoclasm—of envelope pushing, taboo busting, shibboleth shattering—Hinton’s acknowledgment of teen class warfare, Childress’s of heroin abuse, Cormier’s of evil’s ascendancy, and so on.
The one area of life that has most stubbornly resisted such taboo breaking is, however, human sexuality. This is hardly press-stopping news. Puritans invented America, after all, who viewed sexual expression as something to be denied and suppressed. And this attitude has been a hardy perennial ever since. The former New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor (1994, B5) put it a bit more acerbically: “It’s hardly news,” he wrote, “that America is inhabited by large numbers of Puritanical hysterics.”
Whether hysterical or more reasoned, such Puritanism has long flowered in the garden of young adult literature. Margaret A. Edwards (1969, 72) herself acknowledged this, writing in her book The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts, “Many adults seem to think that if sex is not mentioned to adolescents, it will go away. On the contrary it is here to stay and teenagers are avidly interested in it. There are excellent factual books on the market, but the best novels on the subject go beyond the facts to the emotional implications of love.”
Having made that point, Edwards proceeded to discuss what she regarded as eight “exemplary” novels involving sexuality.1 That all eight are adult titles says something, I think, about the near-total lack of YA titles on the subject even as late as 1969; that the preceding decade had been one of sexual liberation and revolution seems to have escaped the notice of young adult authors and publishers! At any rate, of the exemplary eight, Edwards (1969, 72) writes, “All of these have something to say about love that cannot be learned from informational books. Too many adults wish to protect teen-agers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.”
Such reticence assumed life-and-death proportions in the 1980s with the appearance of AIDS and its nearly incomprehensible lesson that love can kill. Before we talk about AIDS—and other sexually transmitted diseases—however, we need to look at the cautious and halting evolution of young adult literature’s attitude toward and treatment of sex.
The first important novel to deal with teenage sexuality was Henry Gregor Felsen’s Two and the Town (Scribner’s, 1952). Though simplistic and cautious by today’s standards, the novel was, nevertheless, fifteen years ahead of its time in its treatment of premarital sex, pregnancy, and forced marriage.
The high school football star Buff Cody gets the dark-haired loner Elaine Truro pregnant, and they are forced by Elaine’s father to marry. When a baby, little Buff, is born, big Buff enlists in the Marine Corps to escape this new burden. Happily, in the corps, he learns how to be a real man and take responsibility for his family. He returns home—after a high school football injury conveniently provides a deus ex machina reason for early separation from the service—determined to be “happy with his wife and little Buff.” Although the possibility of a
happy ending is, thus, held out to the reader, it comes only after a censorious community has thoroughly punished the two teens for their indiscretion. And the implication remains that Buff will probably never get to be the coach he always dreamed of becoming. Such “punishment” for sexual activity was, of course, a de rigueur staple of popular culture at the time.
Despite its carefully cautionary element, Felsen’s book was quite controversial. Edwards (1969, 82) recalls that “the book came off the press in the fifties, a few weeks before the American Library Association met in New York City. There was to be a preconference on young adult work in the public library, and I was to sit on a panel where I expected the book to be questioned. Sure enough [the book] came up for discussion and the panel seemed agreed it ‘was not up to Felsen [a reference, I presume, to his usual standards], which simply meant they thought it too hot to handle. I came to the book’s defense saying we had no other book that dealt honestly with this problem … and asked what they would give to a young person who wanted a book on the subject. One of the true-blue ladies drew herself up and announced, ‘I would give him’ “The Scarlet Letter.”’”
Those Puritans had little to fret about for the next fifteen years, until 1967 brought a second important milestone on the road to YA literature’s sexual liberation: Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (Putnam). At that, there was no cause for immediate alarm, as the book was published in hardcover as an adult novel. However, within a year, it “was offered to high school students through paperback teenage book clubs” (Cart 1996, 192) and quickly became a harbinger, along with The Outsiders and The Contender, of more realistic fiction to come. Its lingering influence and enormous popularity are evidenced by the fact that it has appeared on two of YALSA’s four retrospective best-of-the-best lists.
Bo Jo is not dissimilar to Two and the Town in its bare plot outline. Once again, two teenagers, July and Bo Jo (Bo Jo is the boy) are swept away by passion; July becomes pregnant and they elope. This time, however, the couple’s families attempt to break up the marriage. Her father runs the local bank, and Bo’s works as a construction foreman. Parental interference is the least of July and Bo Jo’s problems, however. They quarrel over money and friends, and their baby dies; they break up, but in the end they are reunited and go off to college together. In the context of what has preceded it, the happy ending may be more author imposed than inevitable; nevertheless, as a work of fiction, the book is a more fully realized effort than Two and the Town, and its popularity spurred a number of imitators. Witness the fact that only three years later in 1970, “four of the five top books sold through the Xerox Educational Publications’ teenage book clubs were about sex and pregnancy” (Kraus 1975, 19).
The same year Bo Jo was published for adults, Zoa Sherburne’s Too Bad about the Haines Girl (Morrow) was published for young adults. This time the teenage girl who becomes pregnant does not marry the father but actually turns, instead, to her parents for help with her problem, one of the rare instances of this happening in early YA books.
A year before that, in 1966, Jeanette Eyerly’s A Girl Like Me (Lippincott) appeared. In this one, it’s not the protagonist but a friend, Cass Carter, who brings shame on her family and is sent off to a Dickensian home for unwed mothers. At the twelfth hour, the baby’s father, the wealthy Brewster Bailey Winfield III (you can’t make this stuff up), appears and volunteers to make Cass an honest woman, but she nobly refuses, having decided to give the baby up for adoption “by somebody who’ll love him, even if it turns out to be a girl—a girl like me” (Kraus 1975, 21).
Abortion as an option in resolving an unwanted teenage pregnancy was not offered until Paul Zindel’s 1969 novel My Darling, My Hamburger (Harper). The indefatigable Jeanette Eyerly wasn’t far behind, though. Her take on the topic, Bonnie Jo, Go Home (Lippincott) appeared in 1972 and presented, the author Norma Klein (1991, 24) noted, “such a negative, dark view of abortion that it would scare the wits out of almost anyone.”
For good or for ill, all these books had one thing in common: they were primarily concerned not with the sexual act but with the (usually dire) consequences. Not so Judy Blume’s revolutionary Forever, which was published in 1975 as a celebration of the sexual act itself. Not only do Blume’s protagonists, high school seniors Katherine and Michael, have sex, they (shudder) enjoy it, and the reader gets to watch the explicit action!
“This time Michael made it last much, much longer, and I got so carried away I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me—and I spread my legs as far apart as I could—and I raised my hips off the bed—and I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last I came.” Whew!
The late Norma Klein (1991, 23), whose own novels offered a similar cinema verité take on teenage sexuality, notes that “‘Forever’ was the first—I hope not the last—book to show teenagers it was all right to have sexual feelings, to be unashamed of this very natural physical and emotional reality. It showed them that love [Blume’s title is ironic, of course], even when it doesn’t last forever, is still an important part of growing up.”
The only trouble with this is that it’s not love that Blume writes about; it’s sex as a rite of passage that Katherine can’t wait to experience and have done with. As a result, it too often seems that Blume has written not a novel but a scarcely dramatized sex manual, including a chapter-long account of Katherine’s visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic (after she has read “a whole bunch of pamphlets” her grandmother has sent her from the organization). However courageous and wonderfully well intentioned it was, Forever remains more tract than novel (though a tract probably wouldn’t name a boy’s penis Ralph as Michael dubs his, providing an occasion for nervous giggling by readers in the years since).
I’m reluctant to offer such harsh-sounding criticism of Forever, because it earned Blume a Margaret Edwards Award in 1996 (it was the only one of her titles the selection committee cited) and because I wholeheartedly agree with Norma Klein’s (1991, 25) assertion, “I would like more, not less, explicit sex in books for teenagers.”
Not to include sex in books for contemporary young adults—48 percent of whom have had sexual intercourse2—is to agree to a de facto conspiracy of silence, to imply to young readers that sex is so awful, so traumatic, so dirty that we can’t even write about it. That’s why I applaud Blume’s candor, because it shattered the prevailing conspiracy of silence and made it possible for the writers who came after her to deal more maturely with one of the most important aspects of life. Well, if not of life then certainly to life, as it wouldn’t exist without the sexual act. Until Blume spoke out, most teenage readers might have been forgiven for continuing to believe that the stork brought babies.
I think Forever also made it possible for young women to consider questions of choice—not about abortion, to which the word choice has now been inextricably linked, but about having sex. They can choose—despite all the wheedling, pleading, and importuning of their male partner—not to be physically intimate, a theme that would inform Norma Fox Mazer’s later novel Up in Seth’s Room (Delacorte, 1979).
It is also thanks to Blume that other writers have had the liberty of beginning the important work of investigating other, less savory aspects of sex—notably its perversion by the interjection of violence in the form of rape and sexual abuse. Thus, in 1976, a year after Forever was published, another important pioneering novel, this one by Richard Peck, appeared. Are You in the House Alone? was arguably the first YA title to deal with rape, not sensationally or exploitatively, but with Peck’s signature sense, sensitivity, and insight. Not surprisingly, it was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Perhaps the last taboo to fall in the literary sexual arena was not rape but another form of sexual abuse, incest, which—according to the National Center for Victims of Crime—“has been cited as the most common form of child abuse.”3
This sensitive subject was first addressed in the pseudonymous Hadley Irwin�
��s 1985 novel Abby, My Love (McElderry), a title that was also chosen as a Best Book for Young Adults. (As mentioned earlier, Scott Bunn’s 1982 novel Just Hold On had also addressed the subject but only peripherally.) Seven and eight years later, respectively, Ruth White dealt with the subject in Weeping Willow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1992) and in 1993 it was Cynthia D. Grant’s turn in “Uncle Vampire” (Atheneum, 1993). In 1994 three of the best books, in terms of literary quality, about this issue were published: Francesca Lia Block’s The Hanged Man (Harper), Cynthia Voigt’s When She Hollers (Scholastic), and Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (Delacorte) (Lena, a sequel to this last novel, was published in 1998).
Though these books are quite different from one another in their treatment of sexual abuse, all have in common the art their gifted authors employ in transforming what could have been a simple journalistic reporting of the facts of this excruciatingly painful problem into powerfully artful literature—literature that is beautiful in its passion and in its righteous anger at the horrors the world sometimes visits on young women.
Incest is defined by the National Center for Victims of Crime as “sexual contact between persons who are so closely related that their marriage is illegal (i.e., parents and children, uncles/aunts and nieces/nephews, etc.). This usually takes the form of an older family member sexually abusing a child or adolescent.”
In many cases, the perpetrator is portrayed in YA books as a stepfather or a mother’s live-in boyfriend (as in the Voigt novel); but more often it is the biological father (Irwin, Block, Woodson), a reflection of real-world circumstance. One expert with the National Center for Victims of Crime, for example, has estimated that 1 million Americans are victims of father-daughter incest, and the number grows by some sixteen thousand each year.