Carol Houck Smith: In Memoriam

I was deeply saddened yesterday to learn, through my agent and friend Amy Rennert, that Carol Houck Smith, the long-time editor at W.W. Norton, had passed away. I met her only once, in 1998, when she escorted Gerald Stern to the National Book Awards, and sat with me and chatted, as if we were lifelong friends. As if I deserved to be there. I emailed with her just occasionally.

But you didn't have to be in her physical presence to feel her emanating goodness, to know that the world was a better place because she lived within it. She edited Andrea Barrett, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Ron Carlson, Rick Bass, Joan Silber. She was, wrote Andrea Barrett in a statement printed by the Washington Post, the sort of editor who did "the simplest (and hardest) task: she asked questions. Questions that presumed the characters created on the page were actual persons, the actions real and consequential, the meanings a matter of life and death." She was the sort who made you feel welcome at her table, who wrote, once, to say that she had "just finished The House of Mirth, if you can believe that. I needed a respite from this century."

Of the books that she edited, I hold as most special The Wild Braid, that magnificent end-of-life collage by Stanley Kunitz. It was so perfectly odd, so uncontained, a spill of garden, words, living, conversation, photographs, and a nearly final page that seems just rightly quotable, this day, in which so many of us are fondly remembering Carol Houck Smith:

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

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Suitability, Stuart Little, and Teen Readers

Jill Lepore, who chairs the History and Literature Program at Harvard and has a novel due out in December, has written a most extraordinary piece in this week's New Yorker. "The Lion and the Mouse" takes a definitive look at E.B. White's journey with Stuart Little and at the librarian and social forces that sought to thwart the perpetually tidy mouse's very existence. Banned from many libraries, despised by the self-righteous, barred from the Newbery Medal list, Stuart Little nonetheless went on to sell more than four million copies. Fortitude is an essential character in the story here. So is the power of American readers to override the gate-keeping critics.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore

In her exquisite essay, Lepore also explores a question that haunted me throughout my chairing of the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury in 2001: What makes a children's book a children's book, especially for stories aimed at the pre-teen and teen set? What, in other words, determines suitability? Young readers have before them an entire world of books—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens, Tolstoy, anything anywhere that sits on any shelf or (now) resides on some virtual post. Why the need for a YA label? Why not just write and sell good books and trust the teens to find them?

In my own work on what will be four novels for young adults and one long short story for an upcoming anthology, I've taken the stance that teens are as smart as and often smarter than adults (at least, as compared with moi, they demonstrate an acutely superior intelligence). Teens are smart, they are discerning, and—trafficking as they do in blog contests and book reviews and often electrifying e-book talk—they are some of the most important readers around. What gets written for and read by teens is being talked about today and will reverberate tomorrow, and so, in my own small way, I have chosen to write about big issues—identity, dying, loss, poverty, and, in the short story, suicide—in language that does not sacrifice itself to some false premise about teen vocabularies.

Today, on the myspace Harperteen blog, I'll be continuing my discussion of an issue I wrestled with earlier this week: brand name novels for girls. In the meantime, I send this calla lily from my garden to bookluver, who embraced HOUSE OF DANCE earlier this week.

http://www.myspace.com/harperteen

http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com/2008/07/house-of-dance.html

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