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So I mentioned that Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE was nearly the only YA book I brought on my vacation (it’s true! I’ve been reading adult fiction up the wazoo!), and iloveamandabynes, AKA my long lost camp roommate, said in comments that she’s been reading it and hadn’t even realized it was YA. Which made me remember that Donnelly also writes for adults, and just because the book looks like YA — the cover and, especially, the page and font size — don’t make it so. In fact, a cursory look at the quotes on the cover would’ve made it obvious that this is clearly not being sold as YA.

…As would’ve simply flipping open to the first sentence: “Polly Nichols, a Whitechapel whore, was profoundly grateful to gin.” Um, yeah. I know YA’s gone through some dark phases, but no.*

The thing, though? I’m still in the first five pages, but this is so written like YA. Check out this paragraph:

Not come to the river? she thought, admiring the silvery Thames as it shimmered in the August sunshine. Who could resist it? Lively waves slapped impatiently at the bottom of the Old Stairs, spraying her. She watched them inching toward her and fancied that the river wanted to touch her toes, swirl up over her ankles, draw her into its beckoning waters, and carry her along with it. Oh, if only she could go.

Seriously, adults read this stuff? …I mean, adults who don’t primarily read books for teenagers. Which, apparently, qualification needs making. **

* By the way, has anyone ever seen an authorial narrator — as opposed to a character — ever refer to anyone, in any YA book, as a “whore”? I’d be stunned but now I’m curious.

** By the way ^2, I would love to hear y’all’s thoughts on whether it’s true that more adults read YA now (it certainly feels true, but given that I’m an adult YA blogger, I kind of think my anecdotal evidence may be selective…) and if lack of plot in adult literary fiction is why. Grossman’s response to critics is here.

Posted in Donnelly, Jennifer, On Genre

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.

Posted in Annie On My Mind, Garden, Nancy, LGBT reads, Luna, On Genre, Peters, Julie Anne, Shades of My So-Called Life

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.

Posted in A New York City childhood, Cameron, Peter, Dessen, Sarah, Levithan, David, Myers, Walter Dean, On Genre, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, Sunrise Over Fallujah

The comments on Monday’s complaint about the hero in WATERSMEET facing insufficient consequences for her mistakes have gotten me thinking about the cognition of reading fiction.

Early in our blog, Emily posted about a study finding that fiction readers’ vicarious experiences of characters’ emotions can be observed in the brain. Emily was puzzled about why this is surprising, and so am I: we know that the subjective experience of reading fiction involves identifying with characters; we know that subjective experiences are reflected in the brain somehow; isn’t this finding inevitable? Or at least, wouldn’t it be far more surprising were this not the case?

Today I’m having a different thought on fiction cognition, inspired by also agreeing with what what Emily commented on the WATERSMEET post: I don’t begrudge other people their good fortune in life (well, except those people I already… grudge), but I hold fictional heroes to a higher standard of needing to earn my respect and their good tidings.

And I think this is common; TV writer Alex Epstein, whose blog and books I think are very smart, often stresses that luck and coincidences in storytelling need to work against the hero, not for them. Otherwise it feels like the hero (not to mention the author) is getting the easy way out.

I’ve always thought this was one of those ways in which the rules of fiction simply diverge from relating what would actually happen in life; I’ve remarked on THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN crossing a bit too hard into the “life really works this way sometimes” side of “semi-autobiographical” at the expense of it’s story. The logic of fiction ain’t necessarily the logic of the world.

One reason, I think, is a simple violation of expectations: good stories set up a challenge, two things that both seem necessary and yet incompatible, and then surprise you with how they resolve the contradiction. You read a story trusting the author that you’re going to get such a twisty, hard-fought resolution; letting the protagonist off easy violates this expectation by resolving (part of) the conflict without any such surprise.

Now, though, I’m wondering if something else is going on in Epstein’s advice that coincidences and good fortune can happen, but only in the villain’s favor. My first year of college I read a fun book about cognitive biases by Thomas Gilovich, HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO. One point of Gilovich’s that stuck with me: he argues that our tendency to judge other people’s failures as reflecting their lack of effort and skill, while chalking up our own disappointments to bad luck, isn’t just egotism. It comes out of something real about our experiences: we have access to our own effort, and so any disappointment seems to occur in spite of this and therefore must be bad luck. Whereas with other people, we don’t necessarily see the efforts they put in, and their failure in and of itself is evidence that this effort must have been insufficient. (Maybe we’d even say that our arrogance is caused by, as much as it causes, asymmetries of information like this?)

Which brings me back to storytelling. I’m thinking maybe one reason we can accept bad luck for protagonists but good luck for villains only is that this is how we experience the world as being for ourselves. So, it’s not quite right that fiction just needs to be set up differently than real life; it’s that fiction needs to be like we experience life, not like it actually is. Emily’s post was about getting into characters’ heads; maybe the characters also need to seem like they’re in yours.

What do you guys think?

Posted in On Genre

Continuing discussion of Fran Cannon Slayton’s WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS…

The most unusual thing about WTWB is that it’s told as a series of vignettes, one each Halloween from 1943 to 1949. At first, I found this narrative style frustrating. After the most arresting vignettes, I didn’t want to skip ahead a year; I wanted to know the aftermath.

The storytelling method grew on me, though. When I thought about it, I always did know what happened next; the vignette style was an economical way of forcing me to imagine the inevitable conclusion.

The seven-year timespan also lets the book’s central relationships — between Jimmy and his father, and Jimmy and the railroad — develop in a natural way. I recently noted, when reading JACOB HAVE I LOVED, that I think it’s rare for middle grade or young adult books to cover long periods of time (finite series like HARRY POTTER being an exception). In fact, now that I think of it, taking place over a particularly long timespan is one of the things that makes even a book that takes place mostly in adolescence come across to me as an “adult book.” It must be something about developing an implicitly adult perspective, looking back on life.

Anyway: one consequence of this tendency toward compressed time is that the conflict sometimes has to develop and be resolved artificially quickly — or at least, books have to take place during periods of crisis, in which a timespan of a few months can carry a narrative arc for something as major as the evolution of a son’s relationship with his father.

WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, on the other hand, is a more naturalistic kind of story, where the changes between some years are subtle; others, more dramatic; and the story as a whole unfolds lackadaisically without wasting time. It’s a nicely different addition to my bookcase.

Posted in On Genre, Slayton, Fran Cannon, When the Whistle Blows

Does every heroine have to have red hair and every love interest “amazingly dark green eyes”? (EVERNIGHT sparked this complaint, but believe you me, it ain’t just that book.)

Ages ago someone named Joelle Anthony posted the red hair thing as #2 (for best friends, but I think it goes for “feisty” protagonists too) in her list of cliches in young adult and middle grade fiction. (She doesn’t have the “amazingly dark green eyes” thing, but she does have “Guys with extraordinarily long eyelashes” — and I can attest that it’s always put in that exact phrase, too.)

How many of these cliches have you noticed, and how many bother you? A huge number struck a chord with me — either as things I’ve been annoyed by myself (”Using coffee, cappuccino, and café latte to describe black people’s skin”) or things that hadn’t really occurred to me, but upon reading, seemed Duh!-worthy (”Using the word ‘rents for parents, but not using any other slang”).

But her ironic choice for #1 (”Lists”) doesn’t do it for me, mostly because I don’t care how often this is done, I love it always and forever — whether it’s Anastasia Krupnik or Bud E. Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.

Emily already mentioned how THE PRINCESS BRIDE is one of the few kids’ books to have been made into a genuinely good movie, but one thing the book does do better comes from its lists: in the movie, when it ends with history’s greatest kiss blah blah blah, it’s a little bit irredeemably cheesy; but in the book, where the narrator’s been obsessively ranking everything about Buttercup all along, it fits perfectly.

Posted in Anastasia Krupnik series, Bud, Not Buddy, Curtis, Christopher Paul, Friday "Why?"/Random Book Questions, Goldman, William S., Lowry, Lois, On Genre, Princess Bride, The