While the publishing industry, in most quarters, continues to slump, one genre has maintained remarkable popularity — Young Adult (YA). Why is this? One reason has to be that YA appeals to multiple demographics, like 12 to 112 year-olds. Yes, adults read YA.
In his article, Why Adults Are Reading Young Adults Fiction, Hunter Baker at Evangel blog explores the possible reasons for this:
Why do so many adults like to read young adult fiction? I think I have the answer. I think we like to read it because it has limits. Young adult fiction has be judicious in the amount of sex and violence it contains. The descriptions can’t be quite as graphic or gratuitous. That means in order for a story to be successful, it really has to be good. A story has to have merit instead of relying on titillation of one kind or the other to succeed.
From my vantage point, Baker’s only partly right. There are plenty of good books that contain sex and/or violence. In fact, some of the YA books he mentions (like Twilight and Harry Potter), have their share of violence and sexual tension. And some YA lit appears to be growing increasingly dark, addressing issues like suicide, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse. So while the absence of “graphic or gratuitous” content may bolster the popularity of some YA, I’m not sure that’s the reason adults read it. Heck, if “clean” stories is all they’re looking for, YA is just one of several outlets.
I relate this question to a time in my life when all my reading was “serious.” Books on theology and deep literary tomes. For whatever reason, I decided to take a break from this heavy stuff and read C.S. Lewis’, Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not exaggerating when I say, it changed my life. From there I read A Wrinkle in Time, then The Hobbit. After that, it was on to George MacDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes, and his fairy tales like The Golden Key and The Princess and the Goblin. Along the way, I discovered I did not miss the “adult” books at all.
Baker writes, “…in order for a story to be successful, it really has to be good.” In other words, by parsing out “titillation of one kind or the other,” the author is able to cut to the chase, and focus on story. It makes sense. Kids have short attention spans. Thus, books aimed at Young Adults must be tighter, trimmed, and scrubbed of literary density. Simply put: YA books are easier to read.
This doesn’t mean the stories are without depth — which is one of the common misconceptions of non-YA readers. They assume that young adult lit is less sophisticated, more adolescent. However, Narnia is chock full of theological allusions. In fact, Lewis made the point of distinguishing between books aimed at the “childish” and the “childlike.” There is an assumption by some adults that YA is “childish,” an intellectual downgrade. Scripture, on the other hand, hails “child-likeness” — wonder, awe, imagination, simplicity, purity — as being almost salvific (Matt. 18:1-6). Maybe this is why Jesus taught in parables. “The Kingdom of God is like…” birds and farmers and prodigal teenagers. He distilled truth to a rudimentary form. In this sense, I wonder that one reason adults read YA fiction is because they are — in the good sense — childlike.
All that to say, adult novels often feel stuffy and pretentious, laden with stylistic devices, existential angst and nihilism, graphic or gratuitous content. Which could be one of the reasons more adults are reading YA.
I'm going to kinda sorta disagree with you here. YA books ARE easier to read, but that's because the general population has been dumbed down a few levels, my guess is since TV really started to get popular or when public education became the standard issue method of learning.
Case in point: look at "YA" literature from the 19th century, like Little Women. Alcott's sentence structures and subject matter would put some modern adult novels to shame…and the target audience was teenage girls. She barely kiddified anything. The extended conversation between the older Laurie and Beth comes to mind.
Part of the reason, too, is that the idea of adolescence isn't nearly what it was back then. Psychologists have built this hokey intermediate stage between child and adult that doesn't actually exist. But that's a different subject altogether.
Dumbed down is a rather crude way to put it, culture change might be more fitting.
Jay, those are good points. Literacy across the board has, historically, flagged. I think contemporary YA lit reflects that. We just don't demand enough of our children. However, there are some YA books that, though they may be simple, are not simplistic. Harry Potter, especially the latter books, are well-written and well-crafted. And there's many others. So I'm not sure we can generalize that all YA lit is easier to read because it is "dumbed down" for kids. And even if YA is easier to read, I'm still not sure if that's the only reason adults still read it. Thanks so much for your comments, Jay!
(I'm working backwards here–got to your blog through the doubt post, but couldn't resist commenting on this one too!) I'm an avid YA literature reader. I'm also an English lit major and quite comfortable in the highbrow grownup stuff, but I'm even writing my honors thesis on children's/YA lit. Personally, I read it for just the reasons you identified. I would also like to point out that most people draw some sort of distinction between books for "children" and books for "YA" (more often identified as adolescents). Not sure how I feel about those divisions, but I will say I get something different out of each of them. The former, that sense of truth in simplicity. The latter, a strong sense of growth and change and conflict–a lot of the discoveries we make as adolescents turn out to be pretty timeless.
NOT a reason why I read it: because it's "easier" to read or more simplistic. There's plenty of Alcott-level writing in the YA world today, and it's an injustice to the people who write it to pretend otherwise. : )
know what I think is strange. Both sides made valid points, and both sides used valid sources for their rejoinders and rebuttals but neither side talked about the real reason for the division in the field of literature and literary criticism, and indeed the definition of sides in general (those that argue for the simple wonder and uncomplicated for the sake of complexity story style of YA vs. the argument of simplicity to reach the simple); that reason of course being Twilight.
Like the hundreds of other competing and imitating works like it Twilight solidifies the debate and sets the tone and the sides because it manages to be both vastly popular and an engrossing read at first glance all while violating most of the rules of story and effective literary construction and the expectation of change and growth and awareness of verisimilitude in story context. Put simply; in a genre which demands heavy emphasis on character development and internal conflict based on the differences inherent in the main story characters (that genre being romantic fiction) it instead uses a plot driven method with mostly sketched two dimensional characters (whose plot, by the by, unarguably derails all momentum in a unsatisfactory and utterly emotionally fraudulent ending, meaning of course the neat and painless love triangle cop-out and the main character getting everything she wanted without sacrifice and learning nothing except how beautiful and wonderful she was and is for no reason at all) to tell a love story amidst outside conflict (which doesn’t hold up as the books progress). The story and it’s extremely UN-verbose (to the point of just plain highlighting the writers limited grasp of her craft) descriptive terms and disturbing emotional and social messages, leaving aside the sociopolitical notion of servitude and codependency propagated by the three main characters, is told in such a way as to be so vastly incorrect as to necessitate in the creation of a new sub-genre. I do recognize that rules are made to be broken but at least be constant in your violations, you can’t have your characters relationship operate on a level of love that passes traditional commitment and enters a realm of supernatural emotional interaction and then use that same core story mechanic to teach a cautionary moral tale and then turn that moralistic message on its ear by having everything work out for the best without sacrifice thus invalidating every side of the debate)
Pick a side and pay for it. That is what’s real, what’s relate-able and what’s true to life.