If you're here for the blogfest, please come back tomorrow!
I'm sure most of you are familiar with the highly opinionated, poorly informed WSJ article about YA books that came out on Friday, but if you aren't please read Darkness Too Visible, by Meghan Cox Gurdon. I'll wait.
Now, I would like to react to this article in three parts. The first one might piss some of my friends off, but even though I hope it doesn't, I'm okay with it if it does. I can only be myself, and I don't know how to do anything but tell the truth.
My first point is that in my reading of this article, the main point the author tries to convey is that it's up to parents to determine what they're children read. I'm not going to say the logic she uses to make this argument is sound, because it isn't, but as a father I have to agree that parents ought to have the right to decide what they're children are exposed to, whether it be TV, Video Games, Books, or even Ads.
It's the law. It's not always the best thing for the child, because parents can just as morally corrupt as anyone, but in most cases parents do know what is best, and even if they don't, they have the right to decide, when it comes to their own children.
You have to keep an open mind as you read the article to realize that's the authors real point, because she tosses out a lot of hyperbole and ignorance that unfortunately (for her) really deflates any valid argument she might have had.
And here I must digress. There was one specific piece of this article that really pissed me off. I'll quote it for you:
Grim though these novels are, they seem positively tame in comparison with what’s on shelves now. In Andrew Smith’s 2010 novel, “The Marbury Lens,” for example, young Jack is drugged, abducted and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of glasses that transport him into an alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?” No happy ending to this one, either.Andrew Smith is a good friend of mine, and I consider his writing some of the most powerful art I've come across in my life. The above paragraph that describes Andrew's novel, The Marbury Lens, takes an admittedly harsh passage out of context, and then makes a weak attempt at using that passage to claim that his book is depraved. Yep, depraved is the word she used. Not dark, not brutal, not violent, not terrifying, not visceral, not disturbing, not too honest to handle ... no, none of those things. If she had said any of those things I would have been okay with it, because it would have been true. Andrew doesn't write easy books. He takes a hard look at things that are ... damn hard to look at, for lack of a better term. But it's important work, and it touches people (at least it does me) on a level that is exactly what makes art great. It should also be pointed out that in the end Jack's story is a happy one. He survives, and the love that he and his best friend have for each other is one of the main reasons he is able to. There's your happy ending. What's so wicked about that?
Now it's time for another interjection. I made a point before about parents not always knowing what is best. And there's been an awesome hashtag #YAsaves trending on Twitter lately, so I'm going to jump in and do something that I don't often do right now.
My mom died when I was 11 years old. My dad was out of the picture. I went to live with an aunt and uncle when she died, and they started shipping me off to boarding schools pretty much right away. I got into a lot of trouble, ending up getting kicked out, and had been a runaway, as in a serious, halfway across the country runaway, three times before I turned 16. Now there are a lot more details to this story, and I may share them someday, but for now I just want to give my own #YAsaves to you readers.
I wasn't reading much at the time. Life, anger, and my own short-sightedness getting in the way as it will do, but if I'd had the opportunity to read Andrew Smith's STICK when I was at that age, it would have given me more hope that any piece of useless adult advice did. What Ms. Gurdon doesn't realize, I think, is that most kids in trouble don't have a nuclear, all American family to tell them what's right and wrong, and if they do, chances are pretty good that one of the parents is a piece of shit who abuses the kid or kids on a regular basis.
Another point I would like to make is that this article used some strange novels to recommend as comparisons to the dark YA they were complaining about. One that I loved when I read it was Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi. I even emailed Andrew the other day and expressed my love for that book. The thing is though, Ship Breaker touches on some very harsh and scary topics itself: substance abuse by a parent, physical abuse by a parent, dead parents, disparity among different levels of socio-economic status, genetic engineering, slavery, oppression of child members of the working and poverty class by the rich and powerful bourgeoisie. Admittedly, Ship Breaker is not quite as brutal, raw or honest as The Marbury Lens, but it's not a book that shies away from telling the truth through fiction, either.
I'm not even going to get into how ironic it is to recommend Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451, a book about burning banned books, in an article that is essentially against honesty and reality in fiction. Hypocrisy much?
Okay, so admittedly I sort of lost track of my three parts idea, but I'm a little passionate about all this, so please forgive me.
I guess the last point that I will make is this: even if every kid out there had a loving family to take care of them, and decide what they ought to be reading, I still think books that reflect the reality of the darker side of life would be important. I mean we can send our teenagers off to war on foreign soil, in the name of ending terror, but we can't let them read about drug abuse, sexual abuse, depression, suicide, or self mutilation?
Ms. Gurdon tries to argue at one point in her article that a young woman who is already depressed might theoretically pick up a book about self mutilation, and then start cutting on herself. I'm no phsycologist, like my friend Sarah Fine, who's post this morning should be very interesting, but I find that scenario highly unlikely. You know what I think is much more likely to happen?
A young woman who has never heard of self mutilation, happens across a book that covers the topic, and then is actually prepared to be supportive when she discovers a friend of hers is so depressed that she is cutting herself.
I think I've probably said enough.
