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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Beth Kephart Interview (with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett)

I've mentioned a podcast recording of a one-hour dialogue I had earlier this week with that gem interviewer, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Our topics ranged from the crafting of authenticity in prose to the genesis of my involvement with young adult novels to the making of Nothing but Ghosts and Undercover (I read excerpts of both). We talked about what makes for good books overall. We spoke of how past awards, past seeming successes are, in fact, always in the past, and that every single day of writing feels brand new, raw, and uncertain.

If you can forgive the popped Ps of a long-distance phone conversation (I hope you can and will), I invite you to listen in here.

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