Anthony Lane on YA: a marketing wheeze

Every now and then, Anthony Lane, The New Yorker movie critic, will go in for the YA kill. He did it here, in his review of the movie "If I Stay," based on the Gayle Forman novel. And he did it again, just a few weeks ago, in his review of "The Fifth Wave."

I quote:

"The film is directed by J. Blakeson and adapted—though perhaps not adapted enough—from the novel by Rick Yancey. In other words, we are in the belly of young-adult fiction: a marketing wheeze dressed up as an art form...."

We have to hand it to Lane for the crisp cleverness of his phraseology. But I think we also have to ask: Is marketing wheeze how the YA category began, what it now is, what it is becoming, or simply an easy (outmoded) mode of attack?

The only way to defend this category from future Lane-isms is to write our stories unclassifiably well.

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writers: let us improve upon our caricatures

"Author tours should not be confused with the rock-and-roll variety. Where bands face a baying throng in a cavernous stadium, writers drone through random chunks of their work at the rear of provincial bookstores, signing copies in the faint hope that the newly enhanced volumes will not appear on eBay before breakfast."

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, reviewing "The End of the Tour"

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Anthony Lane on Young Adult Fiction: a generalized and generally disturbing definition of the form

Generalized definitions of anything—or anyone—are provocative, sure. They get the readers' ire up. Which is to say they attract more readers. I am sure that Anthony Lane of The New Yorker (a terrific if mostly acerbic reviewer) knows that YA fiction comes in many hues and forms and flavors, and that it is fed by many ideals and many wild imaginations, many time periods, many themes, and a full array of characters and landscapes.

But here, in Lane's review of the movie "If I Stay," based on the Gayle Forman novel, he issues a standardizing decree.

Young-adult fiction: what a peculiar product it is, sold and consumed as avidly as the misery memoir and the self-help book, and borrowing sneakily from both. One can see the gap in the market. What are literate kids meant to do with themselves, or with their itchy brains, as they wander the no man's land between Narnia and Philip Roth? The ideal protagonist of the genre is at once victimized and possessed of decisive power—someone like Mia, the heroine of Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which has clung grimly to the Times best-seller list, on and off, for twenty weeks. And the ideal subject is death, or, as we should probably call it, the big sleepover.

Oh, the blogs/articles/talks that will erupt from this. Oh. Or? Perhaps we who write young adult fiction that is not part misery memoir and not self-help book, not, indeed, any single one thing, grow weary of the castigating, the easy sarcasm, the sneak and overt attacks?

Let others stomp their feet and say what they will. We've got work to do.

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Writer: A Definition

These words read an hour ago in "Waiting," Anthony Lane's New Yorker piece on Samuel Beckett's life and letters.

... the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk—and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover—especially if, as in Beckett’s case, lovers were scarce.

Is this it, then—the line that gets drawn, cordoning writers off from the rest of the world? It's not a thought I'd had before. It's one that I weigh now.

And you? Your definition of a writer?

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