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I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction, because I’ve recently read two books set in 2003.

I said before (though I’m not sure if I explained it well) that the intentional dated-ness is one of the things that really worked for me in SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH: we know, if not “the end” to that story, more than the characters do. Walter Dean Myers doesn’t have to show us Birdie learning that there are no WMDs, because we know; it makes his belief more poignant.

(And actually, this makes me think that a very powerful story could be written that goes farther in this direction, and doesn’t have the characters experience the kind of disillusionment that Birdie does undergo in that story. This would really exploit the asymmetry of knowledge between the characters and the readers. Anyone have a good example of a story like this — doesn’t have to be about Iraq?)

More recently (by which I mean yesterday), I read Peter Cameron’s SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU. Emily and I have talked a few times about books set in New York, about which we’re bound to have strong opinions one way or the other; this one rang true to me. Partly that’s because, while it’s set in a far wealthier slice of New York than I usually intersect with (and an eminently parodiable one at that), it just happened to hit the details of my own haunts. This passage made me sit up and cheer:

I wouldn’t become part of the evil empire that is NYU if you paid me. (NYU has single-handedly ruined most of the Village, including the dog run in Washington Square: they built this huge building that casts its shadow over the park, so that areas of the dog run are perpetually in shade.)

I went to NYU, and hated it (great profs; lousy place), and they have ruined big chunks of my neighborhood, and they are an evil empire. Sing it, Cameron.

But besides my own personal joy at seeing my enmity printed in bestselling book form, what I think worked about Cameron’s portrayal of New York was its specificity. When he described the protagonist’s feelings about a specific intersection I’ve walked by hundreds of times (LaGuardia and Houston), I couldn’t remember the details he described from my own wanderings, and I lacked the same associations this character had, but I got it. Not just because the narration was describing the city, but because the way this character described the city made me understand who he was. His character was bound up in it being precisely downtown New York in 2003, and vice-versa. That’s why it felt like New York, not like name-dropping New York.

I can’t get behind this mode of storytelling — this retelling of our own recent past — unreservedly: I saw, for example, that David Levithan’s new book is set on and after 9/11, and I cringed. I’ve had enough of that, thank you.

But in general, I’m intrigued by setting YA books so distinctly in a time we’ve just been through. Compare it to, say, Sarah Dessen’s studied timelessness: her characters are barely digital (keep in mind, I haven’t read her two most recent). I feel like a lot of YA authors are living out their own adolescences in their books, or some warp of their adolescence with their lives now. But contemporary teenagers’ lives aren’t necessarily the intersection of universal teenage angst plus, say, cell phones the way a thirty-something author might use them.* Like, how does it change teenage dating that everyone has a cell? I was extraordinarily privileged to have my own phone line in high school, and let me tell you, my high school dating life was different because of it.

My point is, there’s something else being portrayed in books like Dessen’s, that’s sold like it’s some universal adolescence, but it isn’t (and I’m sorry to always use Dessen as my punching bag, because I love her books, but they are also to me the best representatives of a category of book I can’t quite wrap my head around, or understand why I enjoy so deeply). The “timelessness” is really an experience that never quite existed for anyone: it’s, perhaps, what teenagers living in the ’80s would’ve been like in an altered reality that made pop culture more like today’s (or more cynically — especially since many of the lead characters and love interests in these books are more emotionally mature than half the adults I know — it’s what Gen X women, not just the YA authors but the growing number of adult women YA readers like me, project backwards to reimagine adolescence). And I wonder if the girls who are attracted to Dessen’s books are exactly the girls who are most inclined to try to fit their lives into some idea of what universal girlhood looks like, if that’s part of their appeal.

I’m not getting anywhere thinking more about this… opinions?

* And because I am, to my great surprise, an aspiring demographer, I will tell you that this phenomenon — where the experience of being a particular age at a particular time is something much more specific than just the effects of the age (universalized to any time) plus the effects of the time (for people of any age) — is called a cohort effect. UnderageReading: puzzle over book, name-drop tv show from fifteen years hence, snark, define jargon, call it a day.

One of the reasons Madison’s public library wants me dead is my reluctance to read Walter Dean Myers’s SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH. I returned this to the library, overdue, twice without having read it, before finally getting myself to crack it open (at a point when the creditors’ letters bemoaning my idea that this time, I’m really going to read this! were piling up).

Why the reluctance? I love Myers — I have since some kind soul got me to read MONSTER — and I was excited to know SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH was coming out. I think the source of my Hotel Rwanda-ing of it is mostly that I read about, and think about, and talk about Iraq all the time*, and the idea of doing it at bedtime, when I read kids’ books to relax, was a bit overwhelming.

Of course, I’ve also been working on IRAQIGIRL this past year, putting “children’s/YA books about the Iraq war” a little more firmly into the camp of “work” rather than “chilling out with a sauvignon blanc and a book and pretending there’s not some journal article that some more virtuous grad student somewhere is taking notes on (or writing) while I enjoy this shit.”

Anyway, I was really glad when I finally did force myself to start SUNRISE, because it is excellent. All of Myers’s usual strengths come into play: he manages to genuinely individuate characters by the precise brand of sardonic wit they employ. This feat is one thing that elevates the book over generic war stories, with their military banter so tired we feel we’re on our own third deployment of it; I’ve, sadly, read my fair share of that, too, and Myers is better than it.

Another notable characteristic of SUNRISE is the serious research effort that Myers clearly put into it. Having read a lot of soldiers’ memoirs (nearly all more brutal and negative about the war than what Myers portrays, by the way, although his has certainly been received as a bleak view), SUNRISE broadly accords with what I’ve read and also heard soldiers describe; Myers also makes good use of facts that have more recently come to light — like Blackwater’s role in Iraq — to imagine what the war looked like back in its earliest days.

I particularly appreciated that some of this research was clearly off the beaten path of mainstream U.S. reporting, as when Myers’s protagonist, Robin “Birdy” Perry, witnesses an argument between his superior and a local sheikh:

“Do you really think that we have the problems your papers are reporting?” Hamid asked. “Do you think that people who have lived together more years than your country has been in existence suddenly find it impossible? That the hatred has grown so quickly between Sunnis and Shiites that we must shoot each other and bomb each other?”

The mythology of timeless and unchanging ethnic hatred in Iraq is so taken for granted in the U.S. that I was surprised and happy to see it explicitly challenged in one of the book’s key scenes. And it’s historically accurate: SUNRISE is set in the war’s first year, before the ethnic divisions among Iraqis had become so entrenched by the experience of occupation and by the electoral and military systems designed by the U.S.

That decision to set the story in the war’s early days is what gives Myers’s book its most effective emotional punch: the characters can truly believe that they’re about the find the fabled WMD, and we get to vicariously experience their ultimate betrayal without Myers having to take his story there directly. Here’s another such scene:

“Tell him we didn’t come to kill him,” I said. “That we’re trying to build a democracy over here.”

“You bombed my village,” the old man, his head down, replied slowly in English. “First you shoot into my house, then you come to the door.”

“Where you learn to speak English?” Jonesy asked.

“I drove a cab in London for twelve years,” answered the old man. “When I had enough money to buy a house for my family, I came back to my country.”

“You’re going to be all right,” Jonesy said. “We don’t hurt our prisoners.”

And, of course, everything we know about Abu Ghraib and everything else makes this scene intensely painful.

Which also raises my biggest question about the book. People who are about to be freshmen in college this fall were in sixth grade when the Iraq war began; they were in elementary school during 9/11. Myers’s target audience of high school students, of course, was even younger. Do they even remember the lies about the WMD? Do they remember Abu Ghraib? They never experienced, as news-aware citizens, the days when the most optimistic hopes of Myers’s characters were taken for granted by most Americans. What do they make of this book? And when Jonesy assures his prisoner, do they believe him?

* Emily and I both have a long history of involvement in the antiwar movement; we both, for example, were at different times members of the national coordinating committee of the Campus Antiwar Network, back when were were in college.