A YA genre may be useful for marketers looking to pitch to a certain demographic, but is the demarcation becoming increasingly irrelevant?
What are teenagers thinking? It’s obviously a matter of great interest to teachers, psychologists and parents. It’s also a preoccupation of marketers, who determined some time ago that as consumers, adolescents behave differently than adults and wee children, which explains the emergence of dubious phenomena like emo, the Olsen twins and young-adult fiction.
In the YA section of your nearest bookstore, you’ll find a recently released novel called Why We Broke Up. Written by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) with watercolour sketches by Maira Kalman, it’s the mock-epic story of why Min, a sensitive 16-year-old cinephile, decided to dump Ed, the hunky co-captain of the basketball team. Tender, talky and occasionally tedious, Why We Broke Up captures the urgency and blushing emotion of teen romance, and was written in part to assure young readers that heartbreak is universal and unavoidable. Yet the book’s mellow tone and wry self-awareness also appeal to a more mature audience.
The publisher (Little, Brown) has identified that the book is intended for readers “15 and older,” which seems like an implicit admission of the story’s broad resonance. It also raises a provocative question: Given the reading habits of the population at large, do we even need the “young adult” designation anymore?
According to Jon Savage’s 2007 book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, the notion of young adults as a distinct demographic arose after World War I—many of them had fought in the trenches and became a force in the era’s revolutionary politics. Their consumer clout didn’t become apparent until after World War II, which is roughly when the phrase “teenager” was coined.
Given its caustic portrayal of adolescence, many consider The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, to be one of the first YA books. It’s an ironic legacy, since J.D. Salinger wrote it for a grown-up audience. The fact that Holden Caulfield is beloved by teens and adults alike is surely one of the most convincing arguments against the existence of a separate age category.
The YA genre, defined by the American Library Association as targeted at 12- to 18-year-olds, is ostensibly an intermediate reading stage, where youngsters can confront more mature themes and situations without becoming traumatized. There is a strong emphasis on escapism, which I think is key to instilling a lifetime love of reading. The trouble is, too many YA novels belittle readers with a patronizing version of reality, from the sanitized sexcapades of Gossip Girl to the anodyne depictions of crime in Kathy Reichs’ Virals series. The books may brim with the latest vernacular, but shy away from the gritty, challenging issues in teen-centred novels like Lord of the Flies or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz—you know, the stuff they’re reading in high-school English class.
YA fiction is by no means all rubbish—authors like Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Kenneth Oppel (Skybreaker) are world-class talents with a philosophical edge. The question is, why should they be ghettoized? Especially when more and more adults are turning to YA titles for their pleasure reading—the Harry Potter series was the game-changer, and you need only take public transit to appreciate the grown-up fervour for Twilight or The Hunger Games. That subway snapshot is also likely to reveal a few youngsters paging through The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
It’s worth remembering two things. First, that teens are irrepressibly curious and eager to test their boundaries of taste and tolerance. As a result, many of them tend to read up—that is, tackle subjects that are perhaps beyond what’s deemed age-appropriate. (I read Naked Lunch at 17, and it left me disturbed and befuddled.) The second is that all readers yearn for a great yarn, be it the adventures of a boy wizard or a Swedish computer hacker.
So, what would happen if we eliminated the YA genre and required all fiction to reside on the same shelf? Market saturation would likely lead to fewer throwaway teen series and fewer overly ponderous coming-of-age novels. This attrition would not be a bad thing, if you believe—as I do—that too many novels are published every year anyway. But here’s another thing I believe: Bookworms don’t want artificial categories. They just want a thrilling literary experience.
