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“Yes, you’re older now and you’re a clever swine...” | August 03, 2008
I’m more likely to be struck my lightning than I am to have a novel published. Firstly, and probably most importantly, because I have no novel to publish. But secondly, because it is practically impossible for anyone to get a novel published.
I’m not talking about Lulu or Blurb. I’m talking about publishing the olden, moldy, Miss Havisham-y way: Finding an agent, shopping a book around, securing a deal, getting a write-up in any publication with the words “New York” in the title, selling even a modest amount of copies, and going on a book tour where you drink $2 bottles of treacly chardonnay out of plastic cups and make obscure jokes that people wearing thick plastic-framed glasses, $200 jeans, and worn-out Chuck Taylors — in other words, people painfully, exactly like me — will Twitter about later.
So why would any author in his or her right mind complain about getting published the old-fashioned way? Easy! Because his or her book has been banished to the dark side of the publishing moon: the Young Adult market.
At least, that’s been the prevailing sentiment amongst authors who thought they had written Oprah’s Book Club novels only to find their publisher pimping it to the WB crowd. Which, as this article wisely concludes, is a big fat load of horseshit.
True, it is strange that publishers and marketing departments have tunnel vision concerning coming-of-age books. If it’s about anyone under the age of 18, well, then it’s clearly meant for readers under the age of 18. By that logic, only rabbits should be reading Watership Down.
But maybe it’s something less demographic and more stylistic that makes a publisher say “this is a Young Adult book.” Maybe it’s a certain unselfconsciousness of voice. A directness, a purity, a lack of pretense. And maybe that is something to celebrate, not denigrate.
Now comes the part where I say “some of my favorite books are Young Adult books.” And I list books like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and practically everything by Neil Gaiman. To paraphrase The Smiths, don’t forget the books that made you cry and the books that saved your life. I’ll wager a good portion of yours have “Young Adult” somewhere on the title page, too.
And thank the stars for that. And for J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer and Christopher Paolini and every other writer who isn’t arrogantly ashamed to write for young adults. Without them, it won’t matter how many endnotes David Foster Wallace can fit on a page or what the Cormac McCarthy body count is. Without them, there will be no more readers.