Fiction – Page 3

When “Young Adult” is too “Adult”

Lauren Starnes

R.T. Smith’s most recent post got me thinking about various books that are considered Young Adult fiction and the controversy that surrounds them. Often there seems to be a gray area between books that are considered appropriate for children and young adults and those that are geared more for adults.

Every Christmas I return home mentally exhausted from the last few stressful weeks of the semester, which were primarily spent in the library writing papers and studying for exams. Thus, it has become a sort of holiday tradition that I dedicate a large portion of my break to relaxing and reading “fun” books. Usually I pick these so called “fun” books based on my eleven year-old brother’s knowledgable reccommendations of books that he read and enjoyed. For instance, last Christmas I read the entirety of Rick Riordan’s popular series Percy Jackson & the Olympians. The Percy Jackson books describe a fantastical world where Greek gods still exist and it clearly falls in the YA category. However, this Christmas I deviated from tradition and chose a book that my brother had not yet read. My mother asked me to read the first book in Suzanne Collins’s best-selling young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games, in order to determine if it was appropriate for my little brother. The Hunger Games is a fictional portrayl of a post-apocalyptic country called Panem, which exists where the countries of North America are located today. Every year in Panem, one girl and one boy from each of the 12 districts are selected by a lottery system to compete in a televised battle, in which only one child can survive. Although the writing in The Hunger Games is simple and straightforward, the content is a completely different beast. The story involves complex political, social, and ethical issues and also centers around children being forced to kill other children. I read and enjoyed The Hunger Games, but I concluded that my impressionable younger brother was not mature enough to read it.

What is your take on The Hunger Games and other young adult fiction? Are there other novels that fall into this gray area? What about the Harry Potter series, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or The Giver: where do these books fall in the spectrum?

Senior at Washington and Lee University. Originally from Chattanooga, TN. Majoring in English.

“War Horse” and Hobby Horse

R.T. Smith

Hosting “Saturday Night Live” Daniel Radcliffe thanked the young people whose enthusiasm made the Harry Potter series such a success, then he added to the adults who have also loved the books: “Those books were for children. You were reading children’s’ books.”

We’d been discussing the differences between young adult (YA) fiction and adult (not XXX) fiction in my intern class, and we decided that genre can depend on such subtle facets as atmosphere, tone, range of allusion, as well as what the writer focuses on and what s/he fences out. It can be a shifty threshold, and some who were quick to label the Twilight Series as YA were less certain about the Potter books, though no one wanted to suggest that stylistic originality is a regular feature in YA books.

On film, however, stylistic innovation often accompanies storylines whose emphases are likely to draw children like the Pied Piper, and who doesn’t know that Steven Spielberg is a master of such allure? Since I knew that “War Horse” was based on a novel for the youngsters, why was I surprised at the kind of crowd-pleasing tactics that incline some to say “family fare,” while others say “candy”? It’s an old hobby horse of mine. When the star horse (not “Socks” or “Shadowfax,” but boyish “Joey”) presents himself (these horses have no real gender beyond their names) to the evil teamster to pull the heavy murder machine and save his companion, I see the film’s not-so-sneaky anthropomorphism gone a little haywire. More troubling is the imbalance of “meaningfulness” signifiers that attend the suffering of the horses, while the slaughter of soldiers is quickly glossed over. Maybe this is a facet of any narrative: focal characters’ lives are the ones we’ve made the empathetic covenant with. Still, when the doctors and nurses cease tending wounds to form a kind of parade gallery, the injured stop screaming and the dying, well, aren’t in evidence at all in the climactic reunion scene, I want to ask Spielberg to back off, quit shoveling the mucky sentiment on. The GWTW backdrops and Gerald O’Hara channeling are already over the top.

But I’m not certain it’s the age of the target audience (which will accept without questioning that the interests, appetites and values of the boy hero haven’t altered as he matures and the war progresses) at the center of my discontent. Maybe it’s just the Age, or the State of the Union. Perhaps we’ve seen so many cheesy date movies, talking animals, slashers, superhuman heroes from Asgaard and other extreme addresses that “War Horse” is as close to realism as a film can get and hope to attract a large audience.

All this aimless grousing again. Maybe I should go and re-read Bob Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse (which ought to be moviefied, if Eastwood will direct it) or read a Wilfred Owen poem or two. Maybe I just need a horse that cribs and has to be wormed and drops his apples in the road to help me feel that I’ve escaped to a world that resides within this wider one and will help me take it in without being taken in.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

So long, farewell

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Auf wiedersehen, good night. In what’s been something of a whirlwind semester for me personally, the Shenandoah office has offered a brief respite from the maelstrom of extracurriculars, coursework that fulfills the English department’s torturous early British lit requirement (if there is such a thing as an afterlife, I’m going to find Samuel Richardson and sucker him a good thwack over the nose), weekend social events, and a hundred and two other obligations that come along with being a junior at Washington and Lee. For two or three hours a week, I read fiction for no other reason than to gauge its ability to provoke visceral, vicarious sensation. I’m not meant to analyze every word or close read every syllable (although there’s certainly an element of academic evaluation involved in reading short story submissions), but decide merely whether or not I think a story is good. In the process, I think I’ve learned more about what constitutes good writing than I have perhaps in any traditional English class.

Reading Shenandoah submissions has been hugely instructive for me, especially as a creative writing minor. I’ve never before had the opportunity to rip a story apart at its seams, to see where the weave of a plot doesn’t quite overlap the way it ought to or where the stitching goes a little crooked. In a run of the mill 300-level English course, students are presented with exemplary pieces of fiction that have already survived decades, if not centuries, of literary criticism. Most of the stories we read are immaculately polished—there are no holes in the plot, pieces of dialogue that feel forced, no rushed endings or inconsistent details of setting. We see all of that in Shenandoah submissions. It’s those little differences that separate great from good, good from not quite good enough. And there are a lot of “not quite good enough”s that come through our office. I’ve read so many stories this term that have had a sparkle of something special—if only the author would have pushed his characters a little harder or developed his writing a little further, those pieces could have been brilliant. And I’d like to think we publish only the brilliant ones, the ones that provoke the animal reaction, that make us sit back and think, “Wow.” Or better yet, “I wish I could write like that.”

Fiction or Poetry

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As I filed through papers twice, sometimes thrice, weekly, I noticed that the number of fiction submissions, for the most part, dwarfed the poetry submissions. Not having any standard of comparison, I figured this was pretty much normal and, for the first few weeks, went about my paper clipping, labeling, and enveloping duties without much regard for the inconsistency. It was not until a few weeks in, however, that Professor Smith corroborated what I had not long since pushed in the back of my mind, that volume of fiction submissions, more than ever before, is beginning to surpass that of poetry. As a part of a generation that, I perceive, is not especially fond of poetry unless it is set to music, this is not an especial shock to me, but I must note, however, that such a shift does have greater implications for the character of a generation, particularly with respect to the literature it might be expected to churn out. While the literary complexion of our generation of authors is yet undiscovered, I think, with the aforementioned fiction-poetry discrepancy in mind, that we will see a few things. That fiction greatly outnumbers poetry is, I think, an effect of the proverbial helicopter parent. We have all grown up believing that we have a story to tell, and while that is not necessarily untrue, we’ve grown up believing that it is the only story worth being told. So, by my estimations, not only will fiction continue to outpace poetry, but fiction will continue to take a nonfiction bent, with the lead character based almost exclusively on the author’s image of him- or herself, or the image of the person whom the author would like to be or to avoid becoming. Research for stories will take the form, more and more, of simple introspection. This, to me, is the great irony of literature born of the Information Age.

Ralph Ellison and The Arc of Story

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I would like to address Professor Smith’s earlier entry, which focused on the arc of the narrative and asked for a prime example. In my African American Literature class we have been discussing the architecture of the narrative in Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man. Invisible Man is a novel known for its groundbreaking plot and eloquent construction, with a strong narrative voice and beautiful descriptive qualities. Even though these feats seem effortless for Ellison the novel took seven years for him to complete, and due to the success made his second novel a large obstacle. Upon the first reading of Invisible Man the “general arc” of the novel is obvious from the character’s transformation from a boy to a man. Yet, in this novel it is necessary to see the internal workings of the novel in order to “feel it’s true architecture.”

Without understanding Ellison’s personal story or reading his other essays to gain a greater understanding of his political and social viewpoint, a reader misses the brilliant architecture of his novel. The development of Ellison’s protagonist depends on the architecture. Without the novels complex design Ellison’s main character cannot mature from an innocent young adult to a self-reliant man. As Ellison said in an interview titled The Art of Fiction, “each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of [the main character’s] identity.” Ellison views the novel as a framework in which his protagonist may develop. The smaller sections of the novel inside this framework are what develop the character rather than the plot, and for me this is what makes Invisible Man such a strong work. I believe that it is Ellison’s meticulous construction of Invisible Man that allowed the story to be such a poignant representation of America in the late 1900’s.