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.

Lou Dobbs’ temper tantrum over a slick, corporatized version of Dr. Seuss’s classic environmental children’s book The Lorax and the Studio Ghibli movie The Secret World of Arrietty must be seen to be believed:

Now, let’s be clear about the source material for both of these movies. The Lorax is hardly an anti-business tract: in the picture book, a factory owner called the Once-ler, starts a business that requires him to cut down a certain kind of tree to make a product called a Thneed. The Lorax, who speaks for the animals and plants who are harmed by the Once-ler’s logging activities and his factory’s pollution, warns the Once-ler repeatedly about the impact of his actions, but he ignores them. The ultimate result? An environmental collapse that depopulates the land, and wrecks the Once-ler’s business because he’s run out of trees to support his production and didn’t plant any more. If anything, the book argues that the interests of the environment and industry go hand in hand. That holds true for the movie, too—among the products that are being cross-promoted in connection with it is an SUV.

The Secret World of Arrietty is based on Mary Norton’s fantasy series about tiny people who live in the houses of ordinary humans, which starts with the book, The Borrowers, which since it was first published in 1952 is probably not a direct agent of the Occupy movement, unless Ms. Norton had a crystal ball working for her or something. It is true, though, that the book is based on the idea that “human beans” have more than enough to satisfy them and can spare the occasional piece of doll furniture or fibers from a door mat that the Borrowers can repurpose to make their own lives better. But the book suggests a model that looks a lot more like voluntary charitable giving than forced distribution or an endorsement of theft by the underprivilged.

But the lesson here is less that Dobbs is reaching to make his case in this particular instance. It’s how desperate conservatives are to marginalize some totally reasonable ideas. You can see this sort of thinking in the paranoid argument that bike lanes are part of a United Nations plot to control American communities or the extreme reaction to taxation. These are the sorts of arguments people turn to when they’re out of good, rational ideas to put up against something they just don’t want to happen, because it makes them angry or uncomfortable.

While treating myself to a lazy weekend, I re-read Ellen Raskin’s seminal young adult mystery The Westing Game, and was struck both by how intricate and fun it is (qualities that would be undone by the intrusion of computers into the story, as happens in an unfortunate-looking movie adaptation) and by how complex its politics are for a YA book. Which is not to say that YA novels typically don’t have politics, or that they shouldn’t. But the political messages are often metaphorical, and the lessons are relatively clear and high-level: women can be the equals of men; diversity makes organizations and individuals stronger; benevolence and democratic input are the basis of a strong regime. But both The Westing Game (to which there is, apparently, an unpublished sequel) and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) have complex and indecisive relationships with politics, particularly liberal ones.

In The Westing Game — in which, for the unfamiliar, Samuel Westing, a millionaire immigrant industrialist, fakes his own death in order to play out a complex game with his friends and family — said millionaire immigrant industrialist disguises himself, for part of the game, as a union organizer fired by Westing. The character is far and away the most congenial persona Westing takes on during the course of his charade: the others are an obsequious property manager and a chilly corporate whiz, and we never get much of a sense of what Westing himself must have been like. As a millionaire, he’s secretive, isolated, and disconnected from everyone but the doctor who helps him pull off the masquerade. We know, from a character who knew him when she was a child, that he can be mercilessly critical but generous to people he believes will succeed if they’re given a proper leg up. But as a working-class doorman, he’s allowed to be accessible, a metaphorical organizer in a way that he couldn’t be as an actual organizer. And of course, that character is a fiction, mooting the entire question of whether we’re supposed to think that Westing was wrong to bust the union, whether Westing regrets busting the union, and whether he was a good head of a company as well as a good man, which several characters later decide he was in the course of the game. The book leaves us with the very adult possibility that Westing was many people to many different people — readers have to decide what the sum of Westing’s parts means.

There’s also the question of diversity and affirmative action. The book is written in 1979, but it prefigures in some kinder, gentler ways, the anxieties that seem to have plagued Clarence Thomas’ tenure on the Supreme Court and his fear as a whole. One of the novel’s characters is a judge named J.J. Ford, who sort of seems like what Anita Hill might have turned out to be if the right-wing hadn’t decided to systematically decide to destroy her life: she’s black, single, and extremely accomplished. In the book, she’s paired up with Westing’s union organizer persona as part of the game that Westing’s set up. And without being aware of it, that pairing lets her work out her sense that Westing only mentored her and financed her education because he wanted a black female judge in his pocket, and her anxiety that she was never able to pay him back, freeing herself of her perceived debt to him. In disguise, Westing finds a way to tell her that he genuinely did like her and think she was deserving. It’s a rebuke to the idea that seems to fuel Thomas, that getting a little help along the way (though in this case, it’s financial aid rather than affirmative action) should be considered demeaning.
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This is a great, great interview with Maurice Sendak in The Guardian. I hadn’t known he was gay, and it’s sad to hear his parents were not great about his relationship with his long-term partner, but interesting to see how it affected his work:

His relationship with Eugene, who was a psychoanalyst, lasted almost 50 years. His parents never knew – not officially. “Of course, they knew. Especially my father. My mother was so bewildering and strange and lived in another world, I don’t know what she knew. Nothing was said, but if something had been said, I would have been thrown out of the house. And yet they met him and respected him. Strange.”

Is it any wonder, he says, that his work pitches against euphemism and whitewash in favour of the unvarnished truth? It was a cousin who first encouraged Sendak to look beyond his narrow life in Brooklyn. She was a communist and they weren’t supposed to associate with her, but he and his sister would sneak off to see this woman, who recognised his talent for drawing.

Folks who think that literature for young adults and children is necessarily dumbed-down should read this. The delivery mechanisms may be different for kids than they are for adults. But that doesn’t mean the messages themselves have to be.

The character descriptions for Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic Ender’s Game are out, and while some of them sound a little emotionally simplistic, they also sound generally true to the book, which is promising.

And they also made me realize that all I want for Christmas* is for Abigail Breslin or Chloe Moretz to play Valentine Wiggin. One of the things that’s been most exciting for me about the past couple of years is realizing what a wonderful, strong group of young actresses we have coming up in the wings. Breslin has grown from an odd little girl in Little Miss Sunshine to a warm, funny young person in movies like Definitely, Maybe and No Reservations. Chloe Moretz is rawer — despite the fact that she’s a year younger than Breslin, she’s taken on slightly older-themed roles like Hit Girl in Kick-Ass and the vampire in Let Me In. And Saoirse Ronan’s proved that she can do both the action thing with Hanna and a more delicate kind of girlhood in The Lovely Bones, which I think was flawed but very interesting and sometimes moving. And they’ve all coming up playing well-developed and defined characters, while also avoiding kiddie romance stuff. All of them, but particularly the first two who I think are a bit more age appropriate, would be wonderful at playing a fiercely concentrated and multi-dimensional young blogger, Tavi with a genius for research and geopolitics rather than fashion and girl culture.

On the other hand, I have no real idea about who should play Ender. Maybe it’s just that the girls have gotten more attention or, in what would be a shocking turn of events, there have been a spate of better roles for women than for men. But it seems like there’s a bit of a gender gap for talent in the mid-teen years. And as much as I love me some Valentine (and would love a stand-alone movie about a light-speed traveling activist historian), a great Ender will be key to making this movie work. A great Peter, too.

*We’ll talk my birthday separately.

I like this Bitch Magazine encomium to girl detectives as competent, entrepreneurial role models, but I’m sorry to see the author make the common mistake of leaving out my personal favorite and frequently underlooked teen detective, Trixie Belden.

It may be that I have ties to, and thus a fondness for, the Hudson Valley in New York, Trixie’s home base. And certainly, it’s one reason I could relate to the 13-year-old tomboy detective better than any of her peers. While I had an active interior life as a child, I wasn’t as outrageously alienated as Harriet the Spy, and I couldn’t fathom many of the things that made up her upper-middle class New York City upbringing. Alternatively, Nancy Drew was a little too swish and cool for me, with her blue convertible and her college boyfriend, things that seemed impossibly far away for me as a young reader. But 13-year-old Trixie was perfect: she had short hair like mine, and like me, the regrettable tendency to get snappish with a younger sibling. Being a tomboy didn’t keep her from getting an identity bracelet from a boy, but that triumph was almost an afterthought in an adventure, if I remember correctly, that involved doping racehorses at Saratoga and being marooned some impossible-to-walk number of miles outside of town by the villains doing the doping who had apparently never heard of hitching a lift.

But it was more that Trixie was a beautifully-fitting, not particularly aspirationally-oriented, fiction suit for the kind of little girl I was when I read her novels. Though they’re certainly limited by the perspectives of the time in which they were written, the Trixie Belden books do a very nice job of bringing together characters of different backgrounds together in a way that bridged both class divides and two generations of young adult novels. The child of farmers, Trixie becomes friends with the wealthy Honey Wheeler, helping her become closer to the parents who shipped her off to boarding school for much of her life, and brings into her social group an abused orphan and a reform school kid, as well as her siblings. Some of her friends’ privations are throwbacks to another era — I suppose in retrospect they always collectively reminded me of the crew Jo March brings together in Jo’s Boys. And some of the novel’s moral dichotomies, like the idea that the rich are emotionally cold, can be a bit too on-the-nose.

But this is also a thoroughly modern world where boys and girls can be friends without complications and where girls can be leaders, a world defined but not consumed by the rise of computing and the allure of global superstars like Elizabeth Taylor. In some respects, the Trixie Belden books, like the Nancy Drew series, are the direct predecessor of books like the Gossip Girl series and other products of book packagers like Alloy Entertainment, the result of multiple authors picking up after one left off to keep a popular franchise alive. But Trixie’s storytelling and characterization roots lie in an earlier era when storytelling was meant to bring different kinds of children and young teenagers together around shared goals and values, even if those values were a little square.

This post contains spoilers through the July 21 episode of Louie.

I really love the episodes of Louie that focus on Louis C.K. as a father, in part because I view them as part of a vast, charming, and ultimately blinkered experiment. In theory, Louis should be the perfect father. He tries to be fair, to explain things rationally to his daughters in a way that shows respect for them, and he gets dorkily excited about the kind of things that in ten years or so, his daughters are going to think are pretty awesome, like the Who. In practice, like with his attempts to explain to his younger daughter means that justice doesn’t always mean you get the exact same candy as your sister, sometimes that doesn’t work out.

This episode is one of those moments, beginning as it does with the world’s most epic repetition of “I’m bored!” “Why don’t you answer me?” Louis’ youngest daughter finally asks him. And he delivers the kind of answer that parents in television scripts are supposed to use to illuminate their children’s lives. “Because ‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say,” he tells her. “You live in a great big vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. And even the inside of your own mind is endless. It goes on forever, inwardly. The fact that you’re alive is amazing. So you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’” The thing is, that “great big vast world” sometimes ends up being your dad rocking out to “Who Are You” in the car, a goose by the side of the road, and your racist great aunt.

But the whole scenario gets at why it’s so hard to be a great parent, to be a great literary critic. Being a good person necessarily means holding certain values, but being capable of critical thought, which most of us agree is part of being a good person, means holding a couple of ideas in your head at the time, like the idea that you should respect your 97-year-old great aunt, who says of the place you live that “there’s nothing but niggers, and even worse today, I hear,” while recognizing that calling people niggers is wrong (and calling nuts nigger toes is wrong, too). “How do you try to feel like a good country when you’ve done shitty things as an entire nation?” Louis asks.

The answer, apparently, is gradual progress from generation to generation. Make sure your daughter doesn’t show her penis to a girl with Down syndrome by the dumpster behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, and you’re probably moving things along. And accept that they’re going to spend time with Huckelberry Finn, who is “a dirty little homeless white trash creep.” If your father is this awesome at textual analysis, and this thoughtful about what you read growing up, you’re probably going to turn out okay.

I know that the current pop culture obsession with young adult fiction can seem exhausting, sometimes. Paulie and other folks have tweaked me occasionally in comments, suggesting that something’s wrong when adults are spending as much time and energy as we are on fiction written for people with more limited reading comprehension and life experience. But I think Lois Lowry’s seminal and disturbing dystopian YA classic, The Giver, which Jeff Bridges just bought the movie rights to, with plans to play the adult lead, is a great example of why the genre has fans outside of its target age group.

The Giver is ostensibly similar to a bunch of the other YA adaptations either wrapping up or under way: it features a young protagonist in a science fictional society who awakens to the realities of the structures that prop up that society and the choices and compromises that shape it. But unlike Katniss Everdeen, who becomes the figurehead of a rebellion in The Hunger Games books, or Harry Potter, who is the hope of an entire society in J.K. Rowling’s series coming to a close this summer, The Giver is a much more inward-looking book. It’s based in a society that isn’t outwardly noxious, just tamped down: its residents have traded away emotions and sexual attraction for security. The main character, Jonas, becomes an unusual figure in his community when he’s assigned to succeed the Giver, a figure in his community who is a repository of memories of things other people have left behind, ranging from the ability to see color to sexual desire. In other words, it’s a story about what it’s like to develop a moral imagination.

But it’s also, necessarily, an interior story. Because Jonas and the Giver are the only two people who can see their world for what it is, there’s no real hope that they’ll be able to spark any sort of rebellion. In fact, the very position and experience that gives them power also marginalizes them from the rest of their community — they may be the most alive people in it, but they’re cut off from the world in which they live. As a result, it’s a quieter and less dramatic story, but it’s also more analogous to the actual experience of the target readers, who are old enough to start seeing and understanding the systems and structures that govern their lives, and to be feeling the sting of social isolation. I think the fact that the book’s about a world where an absurdly optimistic victory is impossible is one of the reasons it’s endured so well for almost 20 years: Lowry understands what teenagers are going through, but doesn’t offer the childlike comfort of a happy ending. It’s a book built to help readers look, clear-eyed, forward into adulthood, rather than readers of all ages to peer wistfully back into the past.

I am always delighted to see critics take children’s and young adult literature seriously, and even more so when it happens in the pages of my home away from home, The Atlantic. Benjamin Schwarz’s assessment of Beverly Cleary is largely persuasive, I think—he argues that the specificity of the early Henry and Ramona books made them immortal in their emotional precision, while the latter books were more general, and thus less good:

The later books explore, although less deeply, much wider stretches of more-serious emotional ground—the kinds of realistic and meaningful situations and themes that experts and educators deem enriching in children’s and young-adult fiction, an attitude no less didactic and deadening than that which informed the treacly, uplifting children’s books that Cleary in her early work was rebelling against. In Ramona Forever (1984), Ramona suffers the death of her cat and worries about being supplanted by a new baby, her father being out of work, and her beloved aunt marrying and moving to Alaska, all in about the same number of pages it took Henry and his pals to build a clubhouse, and for him to have a falling-out and (sadly but realistically) only partial reconciliation with his neighbor Beezus. Many characters in the late novels are flat; most are observed with intelligence, but they’re not inhabited. Cleary gets through the vast territory of her plots by relying on longer, more complex sentences, but while these scoop up the gist, they let the particularity escape.

The one thing I think this neglects is Cleary’s young adult fiction. That’s not unusual—everyone seems to forget that Cleary wrote YA as well as children’s novels. But it’s a shame. Fifteen in particular is perhaps the best novel ever written about that rapidly diminishing period of adolescent life, the moment when love first becomes a possibility, but sex is not under discussion or even consideration. It’s a tremendously vulnerable and tender book, full of the kinds of details that Schwarz praises about Cleary’s early novels. The main character’s rival for the heart of the boy she’s begun dating wears a narrow skirt to a dance rather than a full one; Jane (that is our heroine’s name) orders coffee instead of vanilla ice cream at a diner in an attempt to seem sophisticated; on a date gone miserably wrong, said boy buys the main character a backscratcher in San Francisco’s Chinatown as a way to make her feel better; there is a very funny extended Birnam Wood joke that probably would never go over with contemporary young readers.

It is innocent, but I don’t think that makes it irrelevant. Just because teenagers are more sexually active than they were when Cleary wrote Fifteen, but if anything, that makes books about how to navigate relationships with care, consideration, and honesty much more urgently necessary. A prerequisite to helping teenagers make good, safe decisions for themselves is to help them figure out how to talk to each other.