Look, I won’t belabor the current fight about Young Adult fiction, because anyone who’s read me on these topics before probably already knows more or less where I stand. I will say that I am an unabashed fan of some YA fiction. Diana Wynne Jones remains my favorite author. Ever. I wrote, a long while back, about why I love some YA fiction.
But only some, and that reading only takes up a little of my reading time. Because there’s a whole lot that’s out there, and yes, there are certain kinds of artistic and aesthetic pleasures that are vanishingly rare in YA fiction, and those pleasures, difficult or challenging or labor-intensive or discomfiting or not for everyone, are worth pursuing as well. Which gets to really the only central point that should ever be made about these types of controversies: it is never shameful to love something, but it is always shameful to love only one thing, or one kind of thing. And the problem, with the cultures that spring up around these faux-forbidden art forms like YA fiction or romance or comic books or sci-fi, is that the endless complaints about being oppressed or disrespected contribute to the tendency to like only those things. To read nothing but romance, to read only comic books, to read only sci-fi. And yes: that is childish. That is indeed shameful. I’m told that there are people who read through The Lord of the Rings and the flip right back the beginning when they’re finished and start again. That’s not fandom, that’s pathology.
Everybody wins in this current controversy, really. Because people don’t actually like it when they think their preferred art is universally beloved. Raging against the notion that they’ve been disrespected– that’s what they actually like. Just observe their behavior.
If you want your favorite genre or medium to be more celebrated, you should insist that it get better. Alan Jacobs invoked Sturgeon’s Law in this instance. But I actually think that Sturgeon’s Law is precisely the problem with these discussions. Yes, it’s totally true: most of anything is crap. The large majority of every genre or medium is bad. But 90% implies that every genre and medium has an equal admixture of good and bad, and I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t. Look at video games. Of course video games are art, and the very best aspire to the heights that all great art does. But the median video game is absolute trash, as art. By the aesthetic, narrative, thematic, and emotional criteria that we apply to all art, the average video game is just a failure. When 90% of the product you put out there takes remorseless killing as its central focus, that’s not hard to achieve. And while the percentages are better with YA fiction, it’s still the case that so, so much of what gets professionally put out there is terrible. Which is not an insult to the people who read the genre or the people who make the best of the genre. It should instead be a call to get better. But you can’t make that call if you simply say, hey, 90% of everything is crap. That’s just phony egalitarianism.
As I’ve said many times, I simply do not recognize the world that people are talking about now, as though pleasure is forbidden and challenging art is inescapable. But you’ve heard that from me a thousand times.
There are pleasures that can be had in art that cannot spring from that which puts out its lips to be kissed. The art that begs you to love it is fine. We need it. I need it. But it’s the other kind of art that needs defending. That art needs friends. It needs critics. It needs professionals to tell people why they should get outside of the comfort zone, why the work is worth it. But that kind of criticism is the kind that is dying fast, not the kind that takes The Fault in Our Stars seriously. That’s reality.
But you can’t make that call if you simply say, hey, 90% of everything is crap. That’s just phony egalitarianism.
I beg to differ, sir. You’re looking at least one step too far down the line. The problem arises earlier, when Ruth — who, by the way, is both a fine writer and a former student of mine — builds her case around the fact that most YA fiction is lousy. But if most books in other categories are also lousy, then she hasn’t defended her chief claim, which is, after all, a comparative one: You shouldn’t be reading YA but rather these other books.
Which takes us back one more step: the first problem with Ruth’s argument is that it takes a marketing category as a tool of critical description, which is nonsensical. “Young adult fiction” is not a genre, it’s a means of organizing catalogs and bookstore shelves. We can’t make legitimate and useful critical distinctions with tools like that. Even assigning genres, while better than using marketing categories, doesn’t tell us much. The best works of fantasy will be far, far superior — in technique and human value — to the bog-standard MFA-thesis-turned-novel.
I of course have more thoughts about literary value and how we might plausibly make judgments about it, but here I just wanted to explain more fully why I think Ruth’s argument doesn’t hold up.
“Hey, you aren’t engaging with fiction the right way! Stop having fun!”
What do mean in saying things in a medium can be better than other thigns?
So: now I’m going to have to read the thing to find out whether it’s really, as Graham suggests, about a girl who got cancer because she misread Infinite Jest?