by Michael Cart
Regardless of who was first responsible, it is inarguable that, in the late sixties, YA literature was in a hectic period of transition from a literature that had traditionally offered a head-in-the-sand approach to one that offered a more clear-eyed and unflinching look at the often unpleasant realities of American adolescent life.
It would be an uphill battle, though, for not only are young adults inherently romantic; they are also inherently reality denying. Richard Peck (1994, 159), as usual, put it well: “In depicting reality our books are often on a collision course with our readers’ most deeply felt beliefs: that they cannot die or be infected with sexually transmitted diseases, or get pregnant unless they want to, or become addicted to anything. Our books regularly challenge their conviction that the rules don’t apply to them. There are limits to the amount of reality the novel form can encompass. Young adults test the boundaries.”
Lipsyte—and Hinton and Zindel and Donovan, and even Bonham and Hentoff—were among the first to test these boundaries and, in the process, to set aside certain shibboleths that had contributed to the rosy unreality of previous YA novels. The taboos that had hobbled the literature in terms of subject and style had flourished in the complicity of silence that authors had maintained in the forties and fifties. But in the late sixties and early seventies, a new and bolder generation of authors began to break the silence with the power and candor of their voices. “Authors [now] wrote the way people really talked—often ungrammatically, sometimes profanely” (Nilsen and Donelson 1988, 275).
Zindel had written the way two people really talked; in 1973 Alice Childress would go him ten better and write in twelve different voices while also addressing the hard-edged issue of heroin abuse in her novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (Coward, McCann). Hinton would also write about drug abuse (That Was Then, This Is Now, Viking, 1971). As for other taboo topics, Zindel would write about abortion (My Darling, My Hamburger, Harper, 1969); Norma Klein would write about a happily unwed mother (Mom, the Wolfman, and Me, Pantheon, 1972); John Donovan would break one of the strictest taboos of all when he introduced the subject of homosexuality (I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, Harper, 1969); and, in the era of the Vietnam War, Nat Hentoff explored the ethics of the military draft and the hot issue of avoiding it (I’m Really Dragged but Nothing Gets Me Down, Simon & Schuster, 1968).
Robert Cormier and the Seventies
In retrospect, the period from 1967 to 1975 is remarkable for the boldness with which writers began to break new ground, in terms of both subject and style. The single most important innovation of the seventies, however, came at the very end of this period, with the 1974 publication of Robert Cormier’s first young adult novel, The Chocolate War. In it, this working journalist and already established author of adult fiction single-handedly turned the genre in a dramatic new direction by having the courage to write a novel of unprecedented thematic weight and substance for young adults, one that dared to disturb the comfortable universe of both adolescents and the adults who continued to protect their tender sensibilities. It did this by boldly acknowledging that not all endings of novels and real lives are happy ones. In this story of Jerry Renault, a teenage boy who resolutely refuses to sell chocolates in his school’s annual fund-raiser and thereby challenges the accepted order of things with dire consequences, Cormier took his young adult readers into the very heart of darkness for the first time, turned the lights on, and showed them what the landscape there looked like. Alas, it looked alarmingly like the real one we all inhabit and read about in our morning papers and see depicted daily on the evening news. In that novel, and in the fourteen that would follow before Cormier’s death in 2000, he continued to disturb the too-comfortable universe by challenging complacency, by reminding us that, as he himself later said, “adolescence is such a lacerating time that most of us carry the baggage of our adolescence with us all our lives” (Sutton 1982, 33).
Dark forces are at work in the world Cormier limned not only in The Chocolate War but also in such other indispensable novels as I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, Fade, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, We All Fall Down, and so many more. Cormier’s is a deterministic view that sees evil—some-times institutionalized—in a world where conventional morality may not prevail and where there are powerful, faceless forces that will destroy us if we disturb them. Such a revolutionary view opened enormous areas of thematic possibility for writers who would come after him. In turn, this amazing author was always quick to acknowledge his own debt to a writer who came before him: Grahame Greene, whom he called “the writer-mentor of my mature years” (Cart 2000) and whom he was fond of quoting: “The creative writer perceives his world once and for all time in childhood and adolescence and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the public world we all share” (Cormier 1998, 22). Students of young adult literature will know how brilliantly he succeeded.
Had the seventies produced no other writer than Robert Cormier, they would be remembered as the first golden age of young adult literature. Wonderfully, however, the decade also saw the first work of at least half a dozen others who would become grand masters of the field upon receiving the Margaret A. Edwards Award (Cormier himself received the honor in 1991). These others include Judy Blume, whose first novel Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret appeared in 1970; M. E. Kerr, whose first YA novel Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack was published in 1972; Richard Peck, who debuted the same year with Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt; Lois Duncan, whose I Know What You Did Last Summer came along in 1973;2 Walter Dean Myers, with Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff in 1975; and Lois Lowry, with A Summer to Die in 1977. What an extraordinary roster—what an extraordinary decade!
The emergence of a serious body of literature expressly written and published for young adults was also acknowledged—however belatedly—when the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), in 1973, finally began considering YA titles for inclusion on its annual Best Books for Young Adults list (the list had been called by that name since 1966 but had included only adult titles). Three young adult novels were selected for the historic 1973 list, which also contained thirty-one adult titles: Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, Rosa Guy’s The Friends, and Robert Newton Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die.
The Problem with the Problem Novel
Unfortunately, success and innovation often breed not only more success and innovation but also pale imitation, as new techniques are turned into recycled formula, making subject (think “problem”) and theme the tail that wags the dog of the novel. Such was the case in the later seventies with the appearance and swift ascendancy of what has come to be called the problem novel.
The Canadian critic Sheila Egoff (1980, 196) has described the characteristic deficiencies of the problem novel as well as any other observer: “It was very strongly subject-oriented with the interest primarily residing in the topic rather than the telling. The topics—all adult oriented—sound like chapter titles from a textbook on social pathology: divorce, drugs, disappearing parents, desertion and death.” Or think of it this way, and you’ll understand the problem with the problem novel: it is to young adult literature what soap opera is to legitimate drama.
Just why the new novel of realism so often degenerated into the single-issue problem novel may be an unanswerable question. But it surely has something to do with the rapid pace of change overtaking the lives of young people in the late sixties and early seventies and the perhaps belated recognition by writers and publishers that the novel, if it is to have any hope of offering relevance and revelation to its readers, must keep pace with the ever-changing and ever-more-sophisticated ingredients of their daily, real-world lives.
Looking back at the seventies, Egoff (1980, 194) pointed out that “adolescents had been steadily assuming more and more of the attributes, perquisites, and problems of their elders. Like adults, teenagers now had money, cars, jobs, and also drugs, liquor, sex, and the assorte
d difficulties arising therefrom.” The powerful newness of those difficulties and the intoxicatingly sudden freedom to write about them caused some writers to forget the totality of the realistic novel’s mission: it must portray not only real-life circumstances—problems, if you must—but also the real people living in real settings. Hence, this thought from critic—and later Horn Book editor—Roger Sutton (1982, 33): “Instead of a character being the focus of the novel, a condition (or social concern) became the subject of examination.” Or, as Sheila Egoff (1980, 67) argued, “The realistic novel grows out of the personal vision of the writer,” while the problem novel “stems from the writer’s social conscience.”
The writer who, by this measure, apparently boasted the most highly developed social conscience of the sixties and seventies was Jeanette Eyerly, who might be called the queen of the problem novel. One remembers her many, many books not by the richness of their settings or the complexities of the characters but, instead, by the problems her interchangeable kids were forced to deal with. Thus, Drop-Out (1963) is not about people but about the perils and consequences of dropping out of school; A Girl Like Me (1966) is about the wages of teenage pregnancy; abortion is all we remember of Bonnie Jo, Go Home (1972); similarly, the only memorable aspect of The World of Ellen March (1964) is the divorce of the title character’s parents; and, in this ongoing inventory of woe, there appear suicide (The Girl Inside, 1968), drugs (Escape from Nowhere, 1969), runaways (See Dave Run, 1978), and—well, you get the idea.
It’s ironic, however, that while such books were receiving scorn and disapproval from adult reviewers, they were enjoying enormous success with young adult readers. “Teens,” Sutton (1982, 33) wryly observed, “don’t even read these books so much as they gobble them like peanuts, picking them up by the handful, one right after the other.” Deny though they might the relevance of the problems to their own lives (pace Richard Peck), teens seemed to dote on reading about how they plagued other people’s lives. In retrospect, it seems that the problem novel offered readers the same sort of appeal that horror fiction would a decade later: the frisson of reading about darkness from the comfort of a clean, well-lit room.
If the problem novel received an often well-deserved drubbing from reviewers, the early novels of realism did not escape unscathed, either. As early as November 1969, Diane Gersoni Stavn (1969, 139) noted that “an unusual number of juvenile novels aimed at an audience of young teens and attempting realism” had been published in 1968 and 1969, but “these stories [were] often written according to the language, structure, and content specifications of children’s books.”
The next broadside came in 1976, with Jane Abramson’s “Still Playing It Safe: Restricted Realism in Teen Novels,” in which the author argued that “the restrictions on teen fiction result in books that succeed only in mirroring a slick surface realism that too often acts as a cover up… . Books that set out to tackle painful subjects turn into weak testimonies to life’s essential goodness” (38). There is nothing wrong with testimonies, of course, unless they compromise aesthetic inevitability by forcing an unrealistically happy ending on an otherwise realistically downbeat story: suppose, for example, it turns out that the woman Oedipus slept with wasn’t his mother after all and, at story’s end, a gifted eye surgeon is found whose uncanny abilities enable him to restore the self-blinded king’s eyesight. Rex redux!
This kind of manipulation transforms realism into romance and demonstrates the kind of “cockeyed optimism” and “false notes of uplift” that Abramson objected to in teen novels (38). I think she was quite correct in this aspect of her criticism. However, it should be remembered that the kind of realistic novel that was being written in the late sixties and early seventies was still firmly rooted in the traditions of nineteenth-century American realism and its essentially optimistic view that goodness would prevail and that man had the power of free will to make it so. It was not until Cormier’s Chocolate War arrived in 1974 that there was the first hint of determinism and the notion that evil might conceivably carry the day. But it could also be argued that Cormier was operating not in the tradition of realism at all but in that of naturalism, which views human beings as hapless victims of social and natural forces.
Be that as it may, I suspect most readers will be happy simply to acknowledge that whatever these novels were, they were at least different from those of the forties and fifties, and the best of them were good enough for some to call the seventies a golden age of young adult literature.
Others, those who use the phrase “problem novel” as a pejorative, will be less sanguine. Though technically the problem novel and the realistic novel are synonymous (“What’s a novel without a problem?” Marilyn Kriney, the former publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, asked cogently), there are, practically speaking, differences that we have already discussed (Cart 1996, 71). As the seventies drew to a close, those differences loomed large, indeed. For if—despite its occasional lapses—the novel of realism was gradually evolving into something richer and more rewarding, the problem novel was evolving into something, well, ridiculous. As competition for readers’ attention became ever brisker, the problems being addressed had to become ever more sensational until the problem novel reached an arguable nadir in two books whose publication bracketed the decade. The first was Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (Prentice-Hall, 1971) and the second was Scott Bunn’s Just Hold On (Delacorte, 1982).
Though presented as the “authentic” diary of a “real” fifteen-year-old girl who ultimately dies of a drug overdose, Go Ask Alice was actually a work of fiction coauthored by two adults: Beatrice Sparks and Linda Glovach. Nevertheless, as late as the 1998 Aladdin paperback edition, it was still being touted as “the harrowing true story of a teenager’s descent into the seductive world of drugs.” Over the years, the question of the book’s authenticity has become something of a cause célèbre and the issue is even discussed at the urban legends website Snopes.com.
Perhaps because its treatment of the dangers of drug use is so sensational, lurid, and over the top, Go Ask Alice has been hugely successful, never going out of print and selling millions of copies to credulous teenagers. Most modern readers find it unintentionally hilarious in its melodramatic overstatements and, though originally aimed at high school-age students, principally middle school students now read Alice.
Scott Bunn’s Just Hold On, a more serious effort at the tragic consequences of being a teen, proved less enduringly successful, though not for lack of its own sensational content. Time magazine helpfully summarized its plot: “Heroine Charlotte Maag, 16, is raped by her father, an Albany pediatrician. She befriends fellow loner Stephen Hendron, who is hiding the shame and rejection of his own physician-father’s alcoholism. By mid-story Charlotte is on the sauce, Stephen is involved in a homosexual affair with a football star named Rolf, and both tumble into bed with another couple after a bourbon and pot party. At novel’s end Stephen is near catatonia and Charlotte is institutionalized” (Reed 1982, 66).3
This kind of wretched excess suggested that the genre was not only overripe but also overdue for satire. The irrepressible Daniel M. Pinkwater took the cue and responded with his own Young Adult Novel (Crowell, 1982), a hilarious take off on the problem novel. A nice coincidence is that Pinkwater’s novel was published the same year as Bunn’s book, sounding the death knell for the subgenre it represented. Unfortunately, by this time, the shrill sensationalism of the subgenre had exhausted readers, and accordingly, they rejected not only the problem novel but also the novel of realism and maybe even reality itself. And small wonder, for while it may be true that, in popular culture, “The Seventies are often considered a joke decade, defined by shag carpet, pet rocks, streaking, polyester leisure suits, and the thump-thump of Beethoven to a disco beat” (Rollin 1999, 241), it is also true that it was the decade of the Kent State shootings, the forced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, Watergate, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the ignominious end of th
e Vietnam War, the economic hard times of the Carter administration, the Iran hostage crisis, anxiety over the environment (the first Earth Day was held in 1970), the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the violent deaths of her captors. Times were hard; the daily business of life was unsettling, and young readers began turning for relief to a resurgence of the sweetly unrealistic romance novel. Welcome, reader, to the 1980s.
Notes
1. Much of the analysis of early YA literature came from professors of education, that is, teachers who were teaching prospective teachers. Critical writing from teachers of library science came later, as—still later—did work from university English and comparative literature departments.
2. Duncan had actually begun publishing in the 1960s, but her early work was, for the most part, forgettable formula romance.
3. It’s worth noting that the mass media only takes note of YA literature when it’s at its most outrageous.
the eighties—
something old,
something new
The Rise of the Paperback Series, Multicultural
Literature, and Political Correctness
If the laws of physics applied to young adult literature, for every action (read “innovation”), there would be an equal and opposite reaction. One doubts that it was physics—more probably a combination of publishing economics and weariness with hard-edged realism—but it is a fact that just such a reaction followed the decadelong emergence of such realism, with its relatively unsparing and unrelenting focus on life’s darker aspects. That this should have manifested itself as an early eighties renaissance of forties-and fifties-style romance fiction may, at first, seem surprising until one remembers the conservatively nostalgic climate of a country that had also swept a forties movie star and former host of the fifties television series Death Valley Days into the White House.
