I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

I was going to reply with a comment, but I was compelled to delve deeper into the subject.

Reviewing Space

The first question – ‘How much reviewing space is given in national newspapers to this section of publishing?’ – seems most relevant, but is problematic: literary magazines receive little newspaper coverage as well, but few would doubt their intrinsic cultural worth. Review editors of national newspapers are allocating space according to their idea of their readership, which doesn’t include YA readers. Trade publications like Bookseller + Publisher, and various library magazines, represent YA in greater proportions, which suggests that certain publishing sectors rate the value of YA quite highly.

Famous YA Writers

The second two questions – ‘How many writers of YA books can you name?’ and ‘Which YA writer is the winner of the largest (financially speaking) writing prize in the world?’ – would have to be asked of a grand-scale sample if they are to reveal popular attitudes. Perhaps this has been done already, and I simply haven’t discovered it.

Yoof Suf’rage

The question of youth suffrage has more to do with general attitudes to youth than attitudes to the literature published for them. Young adults do not hold the keys to the perception of YA literature beyond the capacity to ‘vote’ with their (or their parents’) money, and teenage-choice awards such as the INKY Awards.

Prices

As Thuy Linh Nguyen commented, it might be that YA books are cheaper because they are generally shorter, and designed to be consumed as a relatively disposable product. They are rarely released in hardback, and they are often designed according to a genre-specific aesthetic, rather than book- or story-specific.

Some Other Thoughts

I recall more claims that we are experiencing a ‘Second Golden Age’ of YA – claims that are much more easily substantiated by sales figures that suggest young people read heaps, which suggests that the most important demographic do rate the genre.

The increase of YA representation on the lists of such publishers as Text, and A&U also supports this claim. Then there’s the recent emergence of YA-specific publishers: black dog books and Ford Street Publishing.

Whether this renaissance of YA has been reported on by the mainstream press or not merely reflects the editorial policies of the majors, which have long-since begun to distance themselves from matters of real social importance, such as youth literacy.

The reasons that Linnet posited for the lower price of YA books are more emotive than reasoned: no publisher or bookseller would deliberately undermine the value of their products or their creators’ intelligence.

Something that might be contributing to the cultural perception of YA is the general bad perception and portrayal of youth. This still doesn’t explain the source of the misconception that YA literature is intrinsically of less value than ‘real’ literature.

Basically

I remain unconvinced that youth literature is under some sort of attack from, or even a passive dismissal by, people out to discredit it as a literary artform. I continue to wonder about where these claims arise from. Who has an interest in undermining the cultural worth of YA literature? Who’s doing it?

If it is merely the community of producers and advocates of the genre feeling self-conscious about enjoying YA as adults, then we need to curb such an insidious inferiority complex, lest YA dig itself into a pit of self-determined cultural irrelevance. If, on the other hand, certain proponents of other forms of literature are leading a charge against YA, then we need to challenge that, because engendering a reading culture among young people is paramount to our literary future.

She likes to rely on her own curiosity when choosing the film she’d like to see, and her own judgement when deciding whether she liked it or not.

He is happy to rely on critics’ opinions when choosing, and then employ his judgement.

Fine, whatever. I don’t choose books by reading book reviews, and I only read reviews after I’ve finished the book – to compare notes.

Good for me.

What annoys me about this article is when the author, Alan Bissett, claims that critics have realised their only skill is determining whether they like or dislike something, and that because the public is in command of a similar faculty, critics must ‘tend towards the elitist’ opinion. To protect their jobs, see.

As a book reviewer who fervently believes in the value of empowering readers with discernment, I find this suggestion utterly unfathomable.

Does anyone have experience of a critic writing reviews for any reason other than to inform the public of art they might like to see?

In a post about competitions and rights, Agent Sydney dishes out such pithy advice as ‘don’t sign away your subsidiary rights’, and challenges publishing houses’ acquisitions of world-exclusive rights from the runners-up of prizes around the nation. Agent Sydney puts it best about Allen & Unwin’s acquisitions:

The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It’s an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.

This blog is in the business of answering stupid questions about publishing, with (mostly) kind and clever answers. Compare this with my dad, who used to answer silly questions with ‘pumpkin’ and then get a rise out of saying, ‘Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.’

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin!

For what it’s worth, I have become highly skeptical of literary prizes, and will be advising clients at Paine Management to seriously consider their motives for entering. Various factors of competition culture appear to be geared against the long-term interests of writers, and Agent Sydney’s is one good example: being shortlisted for a prize might even compromise your chances of getting picked up – if a house is holding onto your second-place MS, you can’t send it elsewhere. Something to think about.

Even if you win, your book comes out among annually regurgitated hype and is presented to the public as an award-winning book. When I read this books I am invariably disappointed: they are award-winning manuscripts; often, at best, they are marginally publishable novels.

This is why so many manuscript-award-winning novelists are one-hit wonders. Sorry if that sounds harsh – it should be no more abrasive than saying Kris Kross were one-hit wonders.

Jump!

So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, oh my lord, the young people are invading! With their depressing music and tight jeans!¹

But I’ve never come across anyone actually saying that about young-adult literature – that it’s ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’.

Are there cases of people saying or writing this? Or is this the inferiority complex of an adolescent genre in an adolescent culture in an adolescent nation?

Whatever the case, I’d like to know the source of this contention. It seems like something worth nipping in the bud.

1. I found this in an article by Karen Healey called ‘Where the Popular Kids are Sitting‘ at Strange Horizons, which I found through Alien Onion

I’ve come up ambivalent about a book I’m reviewing. When this happens I like to make note of the positives and negatives and try to round up with a suggestion that readers should check it out for themselves.

I have no problems suggesting that readers don’t bother if a book is below sub-par, but if something comes up halfway decent, I assume that one person’s free review copy is another person’s first edition.

My problem is that in the process of scraping the barrel, I find myself ploughing deeply into speculation and interpretation of the author’s intentions. I tend to say things like, ‘The author didn’t quite carry this theme, but that’s because they were focussing on this other theme, which is explored well.’

Is this a problem? I’m worried that I’m making concessions for books when they should be flagged as undeveloped. That I might save people the trouble if I were more honest about the book.

If I think the book warrants being supported – if it’s a debut novel and the author has demonstrated considerable promise for certain styles and techniques – is that enough to warrant concocting a positive interpretation? It’s not just this novel in particular – I come up against this with many young-adult and debut novels.

This has been just like trying to fix a car engine: as soon as you start pulling it apart, you find more things to fix, or questions to answer.

There are comments to this post here. I couldn’t carry them over to this new site.