A number of people have passed along Sarah Mesle’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which argues that our recent young adult novels have failed to serve boys particularly well. The essay’s occasioned a number of thoughtful responses, particularly Malinda Lo’s argument that Mesle’s peddling a rather suspicious idea of an essential and inherent masculinity that we ought to be seeking narrative support for. While I’m firmly in Lo’s camp in believing that the strength of young adult fiction is not that it can teach boys or girls a sole way to be men and women, but to offer multiple and affirming ways to shape those identities, I do think there’s something to be said for a question Mesle is asking about whether we’re serving boys well, whether in the way that she imagines, or the way Lo posits. Mesle writes:

The contemporary uncertainty towards young men snaps into focus when we compare recent texts to their literary ancestors — nineteenth-century novels for young readers. Hope Leslie, Jo’s Boys, Northwood, The Lamplighter: these novels heralded the end of boyhood as a happy ending, the beginning of a triumphant journey into a powerful manhood. But today’s YA boys approach their manhood with trepidation. And they should. The adult men who populate YA fictional worlds are often careless, corrupt, incompetent — sometimes even cruel — and only rarely kind.

I agree that boys and young men need good literary role models as much as girls and young women do, and that in our conversations about how to create great female characters, we don’t often have corresponding discussions about how to serve boys with the same intelligence and complexity. Some of that is because there already exist a great many excellent stories about deeply textured young men—having your needs met first has its benefits. But I also wonder if some of what’s at stake here is not that we aren’t creating great stories that foreground the transition from boyhood into manhood. It’s that some of those stories exist, but they’re told through young women’s eyes and from young women’s perspectives that we haven’t yet trained boys to embrace and share.

In much of the classic young adult literature I read as a child, I learned to see myself as boys and men would see me. In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s story of a dystopia, I saw Fiona, a gentle a girl who was blind to the fact that her care for the elderly involved learning to euthanize the oldest among them, and whose ignorance was a source of great pain for Jonas, the novel’s main character. In The Outsiders, Ponyboy’s realization that Cherry Valance’s status as a Soc doesn’t define her as a person guided my interactions with some of the more popular girls who became my friends in middle school and high school. As an ambitious girl on a largely female policy debate team, I hoped my teammates would see me like Petra Arkanian, the only girl good enough to fight alongside Ender Wiggin in Orson Scott Card’s alien invasion novel Ender’s Game. And as an irrepressible nerd, I both hoped and feared that I would end up like Harry Potter‘s Hermoine Granger.

It’s not a bad thing to learn about yourself from how others see you, as long as that’s not the only opportunity you’re given to examine yourself. In fact, it’s one I think more boys should have. So often, male perspectives in these situations are treated like they’re a default norm, while books with female main characters are assumed to be for girls rather than aimed at and available to everyone.
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I suppose Joel Stein thinks he’s being rather clever and sophisticated in his riff for the New York Times about why grown-ups shouldn’t read literature aimed at young adults (something he conflates with picture books). He sniffs:

I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains. Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

Where to begin? First, with a bit of history. Adolesence as we understand it is a rather new invention, and more to the point, the idea of literature aimed squarely at children or at young adults is a relatively new phenomenon in narrative fiction. The first picture books begin trickling out in the 1600s as a combination of instructional or pleasurable reading. And the distinction between children’s, young adult, and plain literature doesn’t come until 1802 when British critic Sarah Trimmer proposed two categories of books, one for those younger than 14, another for literature specifically aimed at those between the ages of 14 and 21, a time when children transitioned into formal adulthood. In other words, those 3,000 years of fiction include an awful lot of writing intended for audiences of mixed ages, whether it’s Jane Austen’s novels or lives of saints, which can be decidedly R-rated.

Second, the ideas that children and young adults are only capable of digesting mush, or that the only way to discuss sophisticated themes is to include explicit sex and violence are pure hogwash. Young people are capable of fairly sophisticated reasoning, of empathy, and even of significant evil, and many of them can rise to meet fairly high bars as readers. A series like the Hunger Games franchise can keep Katniss a virgin throughout the majority of the three books and still communicate the horror of surrendering your sexual and romantic autonomy. Harry Potter may be the first encounter a generation of readers has with the evils of torture and nasty class bias. Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog series is an unflinching exploration of crime and poverty. Simply because these novels are also appropriate for younger readers doesn’t mean the ideas in them are stupid or the prose is unworthy. Not all things written for younger readers are masterpieces, of course. But there’s plenty of bad trash, insipid prose, and deeply stupid ideas in books written for adults. Joel Stein is welcome to it.

Erik Kain flagged this post from Otaku Kun on Brave, Pixar’s upcoming movie that will be its first with a female protagonist. While I don’t agree with his analysis of Disney’s offerings—yes, the company has a strong princess franchise, but Pixar in particular has become acclaimed in part for its sensitive, creative stories about men—I think it’s worth unpacking what lies behind this sentiment: “I’d just like to see a movie from Disney/Pixar for once where the main character is a young boy, who follows his heart and defies his own society and culture, and achieves something more than just mere personal happiness, but actually makes a difference.”

I have nothing against stories where boys get to grow, and be empowered, and slay the dragon, and get the girl. But I don’t exactly think we’re lacking in those kinds of narratives. Across generations and countries, the most popular literary and cinematic phenomenon of the last decade and a half is a nice kid named Harry Potter who achieves both personal happiness and major societal change. Christopher Paolini got to live out that narrative both in real life and on the page when he went from self-publishing homeschooler to best-selling author with his Inheritance series before he was 20. The most kid-friendly superhero in movies and cartoons is Spider-Man.

But I am generally sympathetic to the idea that just as we need more expansive roles for women in pop culture, we need more flexible roles for boys and men that allow for a broader range of emotions. And so I asked Tamora Pierce last year about whether we needed different kinds of boys to act as heroes and role models for male and female readers alike (she is one of the authors I think does best creating fully-realized boys and men). “The majority of boys have male heroes. Even if the characters are animals, they’re male. Girl heroes are by far the minority in children’s literature, which is absolutely infuriating to me, because this was the status quo when I started, and the numbers have not changed that much,” she said, explaining why, though she’s working on her first series with a male main character, she’s more concerned about providing innovative stories about women. “It’s not that I have anything against boys. I just see a need for girl heroes.”

And I wonder if the rise of authors like Pierce, and of a vigorous conversation about roles for women and girls more generally, even if it hasn’t gotten us to character parity or all the depictions we’d like, is something that guys would like a male equivalent of. There’s no question that there are clear archetypes of male characters, from Bad Boys to Nice Guys, and forums for discussion of them ranging from the Good Men Project to lots of good feminist writers. But are there authors or filmmakers who folks think are doing a uniquely good job of building particularly innovative male characters? Clearly there’s some unfulfilled hunger out there for something new. And I’d be curious as to what the men in the audience are feeling most engaged by.

I think this piece from Salon is quite intriguing, particularly in its focus on the ideological purity of country or encampment living, and in arguing that while most of these protagonists spend at least some time allied with revolutionary movements, series often up rejecting them as overly violent or just the same thing as a repressive regime all over again:

But they’re not quite noble savages, because they’re self-aware. In the wild, they find misfits who safeguard learning, hoarding the books and lore that the dystopias have repressed. The Occupy movement often casts itself in a similar light, as its members “rough it” in parks in the middle of cities as if keeping alive a more earthy, simple, honest way of living; their library tents symbolize their devotion to learning from the past as they forge a better way for the future. Indeed, the library is a synecdoche for the movement itself: in Toronto, protesters chained themselves to theirs as it was about to be removed as part of the camp’s eviction; at Occupy Wall Street, the demolishing of the library has been viewed as a repressive dystopian act.

In the wilderness, the dystopian protagonists also encounter rebels – and not necessarily the same people who read books. Unlike in escapist fantasies such as “Star Wars,” where the rebels unambiguously deserve our support as they fight an evil empire with the light side of the force, the rebels in YA dystopias can be as dangerous as those in power. Often the two are mirror images of one another, led by charismatic but delusional figures who seek to wrest power for themselves by violent means and view the teenage heroes as vehicles for them to do so. In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss becomes an icon for the rebels in the legendary District 13 but ultimately distrusts their humorless and pathologically driven leader, Alma Coin; in “Chaos Walking,” Viola (Todd’s girlfriend and female counterpart) falls in with The Answer, a group of terrorists who are healers by profession but are just as adept at setting off bombs, and wouldn’t blink at blowing her up if it achieved their own ends.

Now obviously, conservatives have their radicals, too. But I tend to think most of these setups tend to have the regime in power be a conservative analogue, whether it’s preserving extreme economic inequality as in The Hunger Games or priests entangled with the ruling hierarchy in The Knife of Never Letting Go. And so for the people who are fighting against those regimes to prove to be terrorists or authoritarians suggests an unfortunate equivalence between liberals and conservatives, from reformers and preservers of the status quo. And I think there’s something inherently conservative (and worrying, given the age of the target audience) about narratives that encourage people not to participate in the system or to believe that there’s nothing they can do to improve their lives and the structures that govern them. If you drop out, you may be able to live your life on your own terms. But at some point, you’ll probably need to be in contact with the outside world. And if you come up for air because you need an abortion, or because you’re being affected by environmental degradation, or the economy’s left you destitute and you haven’t done your part to make sure the rest of the world is responsive to your needs, you might be in for a nasty surprise.

Fortunately, there are alternatives like Tamora Pierce’s books, which read collectively and in chronological order tell the story of the abolition of slavery and the liberalization of society in her fictional kingdom of Tortall. It’s a story about reform, and as a result, it takes a long time: the arc spans more than a hundred years and twenty books. Not a lot of authors are going to commit to something that ambitious, nor should they have to. But opting out isn’t the only way you can make a story fit in two to four books. Sometimes, it’s a matter of a compromised outcome, or one reform at a time.

Regular readers know I’m a total nut for Tamora Pierce’s books, particularly her Provost’s Dog series about a cop with magical informants working in a nascent law enforcement system in Corus, the capital city of the kingdom of Tortall she introduced in her first fantasy series, the Lioness books. So I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the conclusion to the trilogy, Mastiff, which came out last week. Spoilers to follow.

I was initially disappointed that the story, which sends Beka, Tunstall, Lady Sabine, and a mage named Farmer Cape on a wild chase across Tortall in search of the Crown Prince, who’s been kidnapped and hidden in a slave caravan, takes them so far from the Lower City of Corus and from the class politics of the city. But Mastiff may be the most stinging book Pierce has written about the impact of a rigid class structure on the psyches of ordinary individuals. Prior books looked at the impact of big institutions on the poor people of the lower city: what it means when law enforcement isn’t reliable, when alternative social welfare networks break down, when the monetary system fails. People Beka knows pay with their lives, and poverty drives people she knows mad, and to dreadful crimes of their own. Mastiff, by contrast, looks upwards from the very poor to the nobility who, angry at the loss of their privileges, stage a devastating rebellion against the crown.

And the book looks up to Tunstall who, despite the reassurances of Lady Sabine, and the reinforcement of Beka, can’t get past the fact that he and his lover are of different classes. His insistence that the relative differences in their statuses are important and substantive eats away at Lady Sabine. And ultimately, it leads him into the most devastating betrayal in any of Pierce’s novels. Tunstall turns traitor, throwing in with the noble rebellion for the promise of a barony that would set his mind at ease about marrying Sabine. His confrontation with Beka is heart-rending because his betrayal is so unnecessary, such a deep reversal of the principals and values by which he’s lived his life: it’s a product only of his inability to stop hearing the artificial arguments of a class system that’s interested only in its own perpetuation. In defeating her teacher, Beka proves that she’s surpassed him as a Dog, and as a person.
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Longtime readers know that I love Tamora Pierce’s novels, and I just got around to finishing the last series of hers I’d never read, the Protector of the Small Quartet. For those not in the know, most of Pierce’s novels (except the Winding Circle books) are set in a fictional medieval-style kingdom called Tortall where some people have magical abilities, and most of them follow a female character as she goes through the process of becoming part of a larger institution, whether it’s a girl disguising herself as a boy to train to become a knight; a young woman going through training to become a full officer in Tortall’s equivalent of a police force; a woman with unusual magical abilities undergoing training by Tortall’s top court mage while also helping out the people who run a unique paramilitary unit; or a girl who ends up running an insurgency in a rival kingdom.

The books are very different from George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice Novels: they’re more optimistic about human nature and substantially less dark; they’re about a country in the process of reform rather than in need of revolution; there is a lot more magic; and they’re young adult novels, so they are for a younger reading level (though still I think very enjoyable for adult readers) and they’re shorter. But read together, I think Pierce’s Tortall novels are a fascinating multi-perspective alternative to A Song of Ice and Fire for people who find Martin’s books beyond their trigger level, and would make really interesting and useful reading for folks who like A Song of Ice and Fire but are interested in alternative ways of exploring some of the same themes and using some of the same tropes.

East Meets West

I tend to think one of the fairest, strongest criticisms of A Song of Ice and Fire — and I think particularly of the HBO adaptation — is the way the franchise treats the Dothraki and people in Essos generally. The novels at least give us some sense of Vaes Dothrak and Dothraki culture in a way that’s completely cut out of the show, which explains neither the way the Dothraki treat other religions nor the tradition of eating the horse’s heart nor Dany’s visceral terror of becoming part of the Dosh Khaleen, and essentially forced into permanent cronehood before she’s had a chance to live. But the novel does spend much more time on the cultures of Westeros and in the heads of Westeroi characters. It’s not entirely without justification — this is a Westeroi throne they’re fighting over, after all. But even if the novels are exposing the idea that Westeroi and Dothraki culture are equally brutal (and Dothraki culture may be more meritocratic), it introduces Dothraki brutality much more quickly and leaves it much closer to the surface.

By contrast, Pierce’s novels introduce an artistically and theologically sophisticated nomadic culture, the Bazhir. While initially, Tortall is trapped in a dynamic where forces led by knights fight on Bazhir raids, the two cultures eventually forge an accord. The Bazhir introduce the Tortallan heir to a new way of governing that brings the two cultures together. That doesn’t mean the dynamic is easy; Bazhir gender roles are even stricter than the already somewhat strict ones in Tortall, and that’s a flash point as Tortall attempts to incorporate the Bazhir into the kingdom. But Bazhir warriors are sometimes more progressive than Tortall is about new kinds of magic, and they also introduce new fighting tactics to the realm. A clash of cultures turns out to be worth working through for the benefits to both sides.
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In the context of yesterday’s Game of Thrones discussion, I was reminded of the Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor tumblr, which I quite like. One of the reasons I think it works so well is that “reasonable” doesn’t appear to be required to mean “unattractive” or “disguising one’s gender.”

Obviously, men’s armor often displays sexual characteristics as well as protecting the bearer, whether it’s the nipples on the Batsuit or armored codpieces. If we’re going to have stories where women are warriors and get to pick their own gear, I think it’s reasonable to assume that some characters will pick things that disguise that they’re women or that minimize their sexual characteristics, while others will pick outfits that are built for style and comfort because they think displays of feminine power will unnerve their enemies (though Eowyn’s big reveal has its advantages for smirking after the fact), because riding astride is easier than riding side saddle so you need to wear pants (that necessarily show off more of your legs than skirts) or just because it feels good to display your body in all its fighting trim.

One of the many, many reasons I wish we’d see adaptations of Tamora Pierce’s books is that her female warriors uniformly have awesome fighting gear, from Alanna of Trebond’s gold-washed armor and lioness rampant-emblazoned shield to Beka Cooper’s many, many concealed knives. The Hunger Games should also be good on this score: Katniss, the heroine, tends to wear fairly comfortable clothes in the Arena, but the series is very smart about fashion and public image as something that can be approached strategically and politically, and not only through a gendered lens.

Seeing that Barack Obama snapped up Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Brave New World, and Room for himself and Frost for his daughter, here are four alternative recommendations for what the First Family might consider reading on their summer vacation — and what it might mean for the rest of the country.

1. Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen. Need motivation to defend the idea that government should enforce labor laws, and that the rich and powerful shouldn’t be allowed to run amok, particularly at the expense of their communities? But still want some good, old-fashioned Spanish Moss-draped intrigue? Matthiessen’s brutal, beautiful story about a Florida planter who terrorizes his community in the state’s frontier years and the people who team up to kill him when his abuses go too far is a haunting reminder of the lawlessness of the American past.

2. Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. So the administration might not have funded that paper about possible first contact — or have much interest in space exploration period. But if you’re going to read slightly dated science fiction, and want to think about the implications of growing corporate power and an aging population that’s going to consume resources a younger generation initially thought would be available to them (see: entitlement reform), you could do worse than to start Kim Stanley Robinson’s seminal trilogy.

3. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. If you’re looking for creepy domestic tales and could use a little motivation to push back against the conservative war on women (thanks for the free birth control though, we appreciate it!), this dystopian classic hits up all sorts of issues, from sexual freedom to the dangers of a stratified class system.

4. Trickster’s Choice, Tamora Pierce. Want to talk insurgencies and your decision-making process in Afghanistan over the vacation dinner table with Sasha? Hook her up with the first of Tamora Pierce’s duology about what it takes to build a movement that can defeat an established government — she won’t need much of a reminder that there’s a difference between feminist spymasters and the Taliban. And at least she won’t be reading Flowers in the Attic.

Long-time readers know that I have a particular interest in fathers and daughters in pop culture; it was the reason that, despite formidable other objections, I really sort of loved Kick-Ass and am excited to see Hanna when I get a chance. So when I interviewed Tamora Pierce for the series on young adult fiction I put together for The Atlantic this week, one of the things I zeroed in on was the relationships her female characters have with their fathers and father figures:

Lots of your female heroines have wonderful father figures.

My dad was the one who got me started writing, and encouraged me to write. He shared a lot of his books with me when I was a kid and we were growing up. I still think my dad walks on water. My interest in military history is due to him, my interest in the American past is due to him. He was just very influential in my life…Especially if you’re going to have a daughter who is going to push her way forward, there’s nothing more important than a father.

That last sentence in particular crystallized some things I’ve been mulling for a while about a new book by Dr. Peggy Drexler, Our Fathers, Ourselves. The book isn’t, as Drexler puts it, “a process based on impersonal science…using statistical analyses to extract facts and figures and draw conclusions based on numbers.” Instead, Drexler presents the patterns she saw in interviews with 75 highly successful women about their relationships with their fathers, setting the table for a conversation about a dynamic that’s hugely ignored in a world that focuses much more on the impact fathers have on their sons.
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One of the popular memes in praise of Game of Thrones is that it’s a fantasy version of The Wire. I don’t think that’s inaccurate, but I think the goal shouldn’t be simply to find the next show that’s like The Wire, but to find ways to incorporate The Wire‘s structural sophistication and political values into lots of shows. To that end, someone should really, really adapt Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog books, the third of which is due out in October.

The Provost’s Dog books are fantasy, set in Tortall, a country Pierce invented in 1983 in her first book, Alanna: The First Adventure. Among the major premises of that world is that individual people have magical abilities and that magical work is part of commerce; that the gods are actively involved in a small number of humans’ lives and that the boundaries between the real world and the realm of the gods can become more porous; and that the dead can communicate with the living.

But despite that setting, this is essentially a structural story. Beka Cooper, the main character, is a young cop (or Dog) in a deeply dysfunctional police force in Corus, Tortall’s capital city. She lives in a rooming house with a bunch of young ne’er-do-wells on the rise in the Court of the Rogue, the city’s criminal hierarchy. She and her partners are essentially an independent task force, senior enough to pursue investigations at their leisure. There’s even an avuncular judge, a gay criminal who’s willing to do deals, a real serial killer, and most importantly, an acknowledgement that government’s abilities are limited, and that sometimes you need extralegal organizations in order to maintain some semblance of order, but those groups are going to be less stable than government agencies.
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