YA Narratives: Reading One’s Age

In an article published in the online magazine Slate in June 2014, just prior to the release of the film adaptation of John Green’s popular and highly acclaimed young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, Ruth Graham berated adult readers for reading “realistic” young adult fiction. Citing the statistic that the “largest group of buyers” for YA “are between ages 30 and 44,” she explains that she fears that books such as Green’s “that are about real teens doing real things”—as distinct from popular franchises such as Divergent and Twilight, which she dismisses as “transparently trashy”—are “replacing literary fiction in the lives of . . . adult readers.” The perspective that social realist young adult fiction invites its readers to inhabit in relation to the world, Graham argues, is essentially immature and uncritical: “It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.” Graham holds up The Fault in Our Stars along with a handful of other best-selling contemporary YA novels—Gayle Forman’s If I Stay, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story—as containing examples of narrative features that adult (that is, mature) readers should reject: “simple” and “uniformly satisfying” endings, a lack of “emotional and moral ambiguity,” and a preponderance of “likable protagonists.” Truly adult pleasures, Graham avows, lie in “messy, unresolved stories” and “in reading about people with whom [readers] can’t empathize at all.”

Graham’s remarks provoked a flurry of commentary, both in the comments section appended to her piece and in blogs and articles that responded to her column. One of these commentators, young adult novelist Caroline Bock, takes offence at Graham’s narrow view of the genre, a view that, in her opinion, ignores the plethora of young adult novels that challenge readers with “compelling, thought-provoking, controversial, gripping characters.” Riffing on the title of Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Bock claims that the fault lies in “us”—that is, in adults who gravitate toward simple, reductive young adult books and ignore all those that are challenging and complex. Bock’s remarks stand out among the comments on Graham’s article, most of which repeat in various ways the conviction that people have the right to read books of whatever sort that give them pleasure.

This insistence was pervasive in the debate that ensued, despite the fact that Graham pointed out explicitly that she had no intention of trying to “disrupt the ‘everyone should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like’ ethos of our era” and that she was seeking, rather, to prompt adult readers to look again at “the complexity of great adult literature,” a point also underlined by her editor, who pulled out the statement “Read whatever you want” for the précis at the head of Graham’s column. In a Huffington Post article entitled “This Is Why Young Adult Books Are Not Only Acceptable, but Beneficial for Adults,” Maddie Crum observes that the “feet-stamping defensiveness” that permeates the responses to Graham sidesteps a critique “of what was originally a nuanced (if problematic) argument.” Graham’s critics, Crum declares, prove Graham’s point while undermining their own claim that “genre books” are “nothing to be ashamed of” and “in many ways beneficial . . . to individuals and society.” Even as she suggests that there might be problems with Graham’s argument, Crum concurs with her conclusion that young adult novels “don’t typically show or tell us anything we don’t already know,” but, she contends, they do allow adults to remember their former selves and to give them a context for who and what they are at present. In this sense, the nostalgia adult readers might experience while reading YA fiction can help make them better people.

Another commentator who took Graham’s...