I sometimes wonder what Dante or Milton or any
of those guys would make of the modern appetite for the young-adult epic. It
wasn’t always a lucrative thing, writing grand, sweeping, fantastical stories,
you know. It was a job for nose-to-the-grindstone, writing-for-the-ages types,
and worldly rewards were low. Milton died in penury, blind and obscure; Dante
met his maker in literal exile. Would they look with envy upon their celebrated
and moneyed modern analogues — your J. K. Rowlings, your Suzanne Collinses?
You do not have to believe the latter match
their ancestors in skill or intelligence to see that they live in a charmed time
for their craft. Writing a big, imaginative epic, and particularly one aimed at
children or that vaguely defined demographic, “young adult,” will get you plenty
of money and status in the grown-up population. You’ll get your big Hollywood
movie, and you’ll get your New Yorker profile.
There is, nonetheless, a downside to this epic
bubble. As in every other area of American life, the sweet smell of success
wafting from on high proves irresistible to Johnny-and-Jane-come-latelies.
Scarce will we have let down our Katniss-inspired braids this year, for example,
than something called “Divergent” will come hurtling toward us. The film
adaptation of the first book in this trilogy comes out in March. The economic
success of these books, written by 25-year-old Veronica Roth, can’t be
overstated. The finale, “Allegiant,” came out in October, and its announced
first printing was two million copies — a number nearly unheard-of in the
depressed coal-mining town that is publishing, these days. It rose to the top of
the best-seller lists instantly, as though by divine right.
It would be a fine thing to be able to declare
“Divergent” worthy of its success. But by the bars of “Harry Potter,” and even
of “The Hunger Games,” the “Divergent” books are threadbare, starved orphans.
They follow Beatrice (Tris) Prior, a girl living in postapocalyptic Chicago.
There, humanity is split into communities organized by psychological aptitude,
determined by a test taken at 16. Tris turns out to have several of these
aptitudes and could conceivably live in a number of different communities, but
that’s not how it’s supposed to go; the government finds the ability to choose
your own life path threatening. So Tris must conceal her “Divergent” status
because otherwise she’ll be killed. She eventually helps lead a revolt.
Sound familiar at all?
“Divergent” is not simply a copycat “Hunger
Games,” but its parallel themes — totalitarianism reducible to the lies of
adults, teenage years presented as a blessed state providing unique access to
Truth, hand-to-hand combat-training as a coming-of-age ritual — make it cut
awfully close. Other points of distinction between the series begin to look
cosmetic when examined closely. Worse, the book’s characters and themes are
blunt, coarse things, with almost no nuance. What is compelling in Katniss, for
example — her ambivalence about power, violence and romantic love — is entirely
absent in Tris, who lives in a world of moral certainties. The regime’s
overthrow is the only right thing to do, worthy of any kind of sacrifice; her
companion, Four, is the man for her from the start of the books to the finish.
In other words the thing is flat, flat, flat.
Curiously, it is the kind of flat that
actually made me angry as I read it. I am not the kind of person who
sniffs at “low culture.” Still, something like “Divergent” has been so hastily
assembled, and then so cynically marketed, that I cannot help being offended on
the part of the reading public. I know it sells, and God knows that publishing
needs the money. But the pushing of this stuff is starting to make me feel as if
we’re all suckers. Cruelly, the gilded age of young-adult literature threatens
to suck the life out of the whole thing.
It isn’t hard to see what has brought us here.
It’s money, plain and simple. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at cold, hard cash
either (like Somerset Maugham, I often wonder if the people who speak
contemptuously of it have ever had to do without). But let’s be clear that the
chase of it guides people into all kinds of misadventures. In publishing, that
means hunting down every young person with an aspiration to write a dystopian or
fantasy epic. Even if they might not sell 450 million copies (as Scholastic
claims Rowling has), the industry is certainly prepared to accept the
consolation prize of the 65 million copies that “The Hunger Games” sold
domestically.
Few are bothered by the costs of this
excitement, though successful writers in the young-adult market do seem to have
noticed the way the industry depends on them. John Green, whose (excellent,
though non-epic) young-adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars ” will get its own
film adaptation in May, explained his predicament to The Chicago Tribune last
fall: “It’s a massive amount of pressure, and not just from fans, but from
people whose jobs are on the line because of what you write.” And that
pressure’s twin seems to be a blunt carelessness in selecting and editing new
work for publication. Most of these Next Big Things appear to have escaped any
serious redlining. It seems their “editors” simply pray to the gods of chance
that the author lands on a critical featherbed, rather than being thrown to the
wolves.
But the wolves are everywhere. Veronica Roth,
the author of “Divergent,” recently told the press that she has been given a
diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. It was triggered, she said, by the
amount of nasty Internet commentary her writing had generated. There were
one-star reviews on Amazon, she said, and complaints that she writes like “a
fourth grader.” And the tide keeps rising. One Goodreads reviewer wrote that the
most recent book makes him question whether he’ll “ever [read] another dystopian
trilogy.” Roth has written on her personal blog, too, about the effects of the
“constant, abundant and very, very public” criticism she gets. (Of which I am,
with this essay, now a regretful part.)
Anyone who writes at all can only sympathize
with Roth. It doesn’t matter whether you are she or Zadie Smith: Someone on the
Internet will hate what you do. But Smith isn’t marketed to the masses the way
that Roth is. And to top it all off, Roth was 21 when she sold the book and all
this started. Had I been exposed to such widespread public scrutiny at that age,
I doubt I’d have survived it.
Of course, Roth was selected for this fate in
part because she was young. Youth is key to the marketing message. I could not
help noticing how Roth’s case echoed in another over the summer: Samantha
Shannon’s. She was a 21-year-old Oxford student when her first novel, “The Bone
Season,” was declared the Next Big Thing last August. “The Bone Season” is a bit
hard to summarize in a paragraph or two: It involves clairvoyants, alternate
dimensions and a penal colony for those with supernatural powers. As such, it
drew comparisons with “Harry Potter ” rather than with “The Hunger Games.” Hopes
were clearly high for its instant blockbuster success, and Shannon had all the
ritual blessings the young-adult epic market can offer: a six-figure deal for
the first three planned books of seven and a prepublication purchase of film
rights. The “Today” show declared it the inaugural pick of its Book
Club.
But readers did not respond, not this time.
According to Nielsen Bookscan, American sales were in the low-to-mid-five
figures in hardcover.
I often wonder if the people in charge of
these decisions noticed that Rowling was 30 when she sold “Harry Potter,” or
that Collins was 46 when “The Hunger Games” appeared. If they did, then they
must have also noticed how much the present state of affairs resembles the
Hollywood starlet system. But I know why movie producers prefer the young ones.
That position is even less defensible among book editors.
The way we yearn for the high end of this work
makes the crassness of the current production model all the more infuriating.
Young-adult literature is often, in our era, called the last refuge of “good
stories.” We think of the best of these books as having a unique, if
occasionally idiosyncratic, purity of form and content. That sort of argument
actually predates us considerably. C. S. Lewis once wrote, in an oft-quoted
article on his affection for the fairy tale, that he liked the form for “its
brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its
inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas.’ ” Much
if not all of this applies more widely to books ostensibly written for the
young. Even we adults, like Lewis, appreciate that they avoid the baggage
attached to the more self-evidently literary.
Forgive the presumption, but our present
circumstances lead me to suggest another item for C. S. Lewis’s list: We like
these stories because they have a special relationship with time. Children’s
literature toys with our chronological expectations because the best of it has
always been written, actually, by the comparatively elderly. Lewis himself was
51 when the “Narnia” books came out; Lois Lowry was 56 when “The Giver” was
published; Madeleine L’Engle wrote “A Wrinkle in Time” in her 40s, and L. Frank
Baum his “Oz” books in the same decade of his life.
Age is what the greats have in common. The
long years between adolescence and middle age seem to be necessary soil for this
craft. It requires roots, and no quick shoots will do. They need years to grow
and tangle and set before the brilliant, unforgettable book appears. Many
authors of this fare end up leading eccentric lives — check out biographies of
Baum, or L’Engle — in part because their attention swivels backward, but the
sacrifice seems to be worth it.
I suppose I’m admitting that those people who
call young-adult readers “childish” are onto something. It’s just not the pure
desire for regression they pompously diagnose. It’s a desire for stories
substantial enough to withstand the ages, that are like smooth river rocks you
can turn over and over again. It is an echo of the writing-for-the-ages stuff,
and it’s worth preserving. Not least because it is, oddly, one of the last
bulwarks of cultural appetite we have against the fast-moving vaudeville of
“digital culture.” I think we’d better treasure and nurture it.
See, surrender this all to the widening gyre,
and you damn the last readers to the rhythm we’ve adopted elsewhere, a sort of
endless stumbling onstage; we just give the ones we don’t like the hook. We
don’t worry about the performers once they step off, and we instantly forget
what they’ve been saying, because the show’s producers have endless supply.
Behind curtain three, and four, and 75, is another young woman like Veronica
Roth whose hopes we’re all quite happy to chew up and spit out. At least she has
enough money to use as earplugs.
from: NY Times
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