Why young adult books should not be for older adult readers

The Fault in Our Stars is only the latest YA novel the older generation (and Hollywood) has fallen for

As The Fault in Our Stars barrelled into theatres this weekend, earning $65 million worldwide at the box office, it can be hard to remember that once upon a time an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading the novel that inspired it.

Not because it is bad — it isn’t — but because it was written for teenagers.

The once unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride.

A2012 survey by a market research firm found that 55 per cent of these books are bought by people older than18. (The definition of YA is increasingly fuzzy, but it generally refers to books written for-12- to 17-year-olds. Meanwhile, the cultural definition of “young adult” now stretches practically to age 30, which may have something to do with this whole phenomenon.)

The largest group of buyers in that survey — accounting for a whopping 28 per cent of all YA sales — are between ages 30 and 44. That’s my demographic, which might be why I wasn’t surprised to hear this news. I’m surrounded by YA-loving adults, both in real life and online. Today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is worldly and adult-worthy. That has kept me bashful about expressing my own fuddyduddy opinion: Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children. Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature. I’m talking about the genre the publishing industry calls “realistic fiction.” These are the books, such as The Fault in Our Stars, that are about real teens doing real things, and that rise and fall not only on the strength of their stories but, theoretically, on the quality of their writing. These are the books that could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers. And that’s a shame.

The Fault in Our Stars is the most obvious juggernaut, but it’s not the only YA book for which adults (and Hollywood) have gone crazy. Coming to theatres later this summer is If I Stay, based on Gayle Forman’s recent novel about a teenage girl in a coma. And DreamWorks just announced it bought the rights to Eleanor & Park.

That’s Rainbow Rowell’s outcast romance that Kirkus Reviews said “will captivate teen and adult readers alike.” Before these there were the bestsellers (and movies) The Perks of Being a Wallflower and It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Adult fans of these books declare confidently that YA is more sophisticated than ever. This kind of thing is hard to quantify, though I will say that my own life as a YA reader way back in the early 1990s was hardly wanting for either satisfaction or sophistication. Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and reread them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader. I’m a reader who did not weep, contra every article ever written about the book, when I read The Fault in Our Stars. I thought, mmm, that’s a nicely written book for 13-year-olds. If I’m being honest, it also left me saying “oh, brother” out loud more than once. That will sound harsh to these characters’ legions of ardent fans. But even the myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia. As the writer Jen Doll, who used to have a column called “YA for Grownups,” put it in an essay last year, “at its heart, YA aims to be pleasurable.” But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction — of the real world — is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.

Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.

If people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.

I do not begrudge young adults themselves their renaissance of fiction. I want teenagers and ambitious preteens to have as many wonderful books to read as possible, including books about their own lives.

But I remember, when I was a young adult, being desperate to earn my way into the adult stacks; I wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world where all the adults were camped out in mine. There’s a special reward in that feeling of stretching yourself beyond the YA mark, akin to the excitement of graduating out of the kiddie pool and the rest of the padded trappings of childhood: it’s the thrill of growing up.

When I think about what I learned about love, relationships, sex, trauma, happiness and all the rest — you know, life — from the extracurricular reading I did in high school, I think of John Updike and Alice Munro and other authors whose work has only become richer to me as I have grown older and never makes me roll my eyes.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Shailene Woodley, the 22-year-old star of the latest YA blockbuster.

“Last year, when I made Fault, I could still empathize with adolescence,” she told New York magazine, explaining why she is finished making teenage movies. “But I’m not a young adult any more. I’m a woman.”