Although my oldest daughter is still months away from qualifying as a “tween,” I’ve got teen troubles. My problem is Lucy, the fifteen year old girl who is the protagonist of my first novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff. She has plenty of problems of her own, considering that she lost her vision and the person who mattered most in her life when her anarchist father suicide-bombed a post office. When formerly homeschooled Lucy goes to school for the first time on a scholarship at a progressive boarding school in Arizona, she meets new friends, but also finds new problems. She falls in love with painting, which puts her in the awkward position of being unable to see, and therefore judge, her own work. The unscrupulous teacher who encourages her painting, French artist-in-residence Monsieur Touchefeu, becomes her lover and, ultimately, an exploitative promoter of her work.
Lucy is a problem for me because, according to the prevailing logic of the literary marketplace, her problems are supposed to appeal primarily to a teenage or young adult audience. When I pitched the book at a writers’ conference, each literary agent who heard the basic outline of my story was quick to associate it with “YA,” which is shorthand for what has become the hottest category in fiction. In other words, this meant my book might have a sliver of a chance of selling. One agent argued that my story would “work” as YA if I set it in 2010 instead of 1985 and changed the anarchist father to someone like Joe Stack, the guy who flew a plane into the IRS building. I ignored that last bit of advice, but began to submit queries to agents referring to my book’s potential “crossover young adult” appeal. A handful of agents have requested the full or partial manuscript, but some of the ensuing feedback suggests that Blind Girl’s Bluff does not quite fit the YA mold—or break the mold in quite the right way.
What irks me is the notion that a novel about a fifteen year old is somehow out of place now in the more general category of literary fiction. The segmentation of the marketplace creates artificial barriers that are as likely to deter prospective readers as to attract them. When I think of the classic novels that, like mine, feature young protagonists and boarding school settings (J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to name a few), I wonder if they would have had the same broad cultural impact if they had borne a label as specific as YA.
Of course, it is a well-known paradox that many older readers have embraced YA fiction. To explain this phenomenon, people point to the unexpected success of the Harry Potter books with adults and the subsequent craze surrounding the Twilight series. Along with all the YA genre fiction, there is a rich subcategory of literary (or “serious”) YA (Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why is one popular example). I am happy for all the YA authors who have benefitted from this trend, yet suspect it may have the negative side effect of crowding out coming-of-age narratives with a more “adult” sensibility. My hope, however, is that agents and publishers will recognize that if adults are willing to read YA, then they may be just as willing to read novels about teenagers even if they don’t fit the YA mold.
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