Lauren Conrad and Jack Vance: Together, but Not

This interesting pairing in today's New York Times Magazine: the page 15 piece featuring Lauren Conrad's Y.A. book L.A. Candy, and the Carlo Rotella profile, on page 20, of "the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy," Jack Vance.

Conrad's book, as Virginia Heffernan writes, "chronicles the intriguingly solemn experience of a young provincial who moves to Los Angeles to become an event planner and achieves hollow fame." From the unabashed bestseller Heffernan shares such lines as these: He took out a piece of double-sided tape and began peeling the paper off one side. "Well, I'm gonna have you tape this microphone to the inside of the front of your bra and run the wire around your side, then I'll clip the mike pack on the back of you bra."

While Vance might also be categorized as a YA author, his work, Rotella writes, "leaves you with a sense of formality, of having been present at an occasion when, for all the jokiness and the fun of made-up words, the serious business of literary entertainment was transacted. And it teaches a lasting lesson about the writer's craft: Whatever's on the cover, you can always aim high." Vance, who has been blind for years, has been writing for six decades. He's won awards and he supported a family. But he has, in Rotella's words, "been hidden in plain sight for as along as he has been publishing." He has not gone onto MTV-quality fame and fortune from the stories he's imagined.

Nonetheless, it is Vance who has inspired a generation of writers—Neil Gaiman, for one, Michael Chabon, Rotella himself. Vance about whom Rotella writes powerfully:

Most of these writers were adolescents when they first read Vance, who awoke in them an appreciation for the artistic possibilities of language. When applied to literature, "adolescent" does not only have to mean pedestrain prose that evokes the strong feelings of emotionally inexperienced people. "Adolescent" can also mean writing that inspires the first conscious stirrings of literary sensibility. So, yes, Vance worked exclusively in adolescent genres—if under that heading we include the transformative experience of falling in love for the first time with a beautiful sentence.

We struggle all the time in this business to define YA literature. Rotella, I think, has just expanded our understanding.