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| From
the March/April 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Borderlands
As a Printz winner, Postcards from No Man’s Land was greeted with some hostility among rank-and-file YA librarians, especially coming on the heels of the two previous winners, David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness and An Na’s A Step from Heaven, two books that also were perceived as having a limited audience. Many longed for a return to a more accessible book for teens, such as the inaugural winner, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster. To be sure, the literary novel was gaining a foothold in YA literature, and it was deeply unsettling to many advocates of teen reading and literature, especially as much of the award attention for these books seemed directly disproportionate to the size, if not the enthusiasm, of their teen audiences. Postcards from No Man’s Land was by no means the first crossover novel (those books that appeal to both teenagers and adults, which could have been published for either market), but its high visibility showcased many of the elements — mature themes, older characters, sophisticated language, and leisurely pacing — that many thought made it more appropriate for an adult audience. Not surprisingly, the crossover novel has continued to command its share of attention, and questions about the nature of the YA novel and its audience continue to be hotly debated. This past year saw Aidan Chambers going head-to-head with M. T. Anderson again in a pair of behemoth novels, This Is All and the first volume of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, respectively. These novels, along with Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, all three stunning in their ambition, threaten to redefine not only the crossover novel but the young adult novel itself. Indeed, next to these three it seems almost silly to argue that Kit’s Wilderness, A Step from Heaven, or even Postcards from No Man’s Land are inaccessible to teens. It’s a measure of how rapidly the field is evolving. It is probable that just a few years ago none of these books would have been published as YA, but the fantasy renaissance led by Harry Potter and His Dark Materials brought a huge financial windfall to the field, making publishers realize just how lucrative the market could be if it grew beyond its problem novel origins to include genre fiction and literary fiction, especially for the neglected upper end of the age range. Accordingly, advances and print runs also rose significantly, making the young adult field more enticing for adult authors, and there has been a steady influx of them — Joyce Carol Oates, James Patterson, and Alice Hoffman, to name a few. But while the field is richer for their participation, it does not entirely explain the crossover phenomenon. After all, Zusak, Anderson, and Chambers are not adult authors invading YA turf but rather home-grown YA authors. It could be that authors have always wanted to write stories of this size and scope for a teen audience but until recently were not at liberty to do so. Whether you want to blame Harry Potter or the oft-rumored death of editing, page counts have grown exponentially in recent years, and obviously more pages can tell a bigger, more ambitious story. Bigger is not necessarily better, however, and authors who use this many pages wisely and purposefully seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I would argue that The Book Thief, Octavian Nothing, and This Is All are exceptions: these books are long, but they are long for a good reason. They would all be very different — and inferior — stories if they had to be contained in just a couple of hundred pages. In this new era of the crossover novel, publishers have had to make decisions about whether to publish certain books as YA titles or not. Obviously, publishers want their books to have the largest audience possible, and increased publicity in the form of awards and reviews can help a book find its audience and boost sales. Teens can be a very tenacious audience, often much more patient and open-minded than their adult counterparts, and there is probably not a text in existence that has not been read by some teenager somewhere. In the past, a small teen audience normally meant that a book was either published on the adult side of the house, reworked until it was deemed more viable for a YA audience, or simply not published. In the past, teens were regularly encouraged to graduate from YA books and read titles written and marketed for adults. Now, more and more adults acknowledge that some of the best writing today is in the YA field and find no shame or stigma in reading it. Is it any wonder that the publishers of these three novels have chosen to capitalize on the already built-in audiences of these authors, particularly when it increases the chances of publicity? The National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Prize, and the Printz Award have all borne witness to the tremendous resurgence in YA literature in the past decade, and while these awards may not translate into sales as do the Newbery and Caldecott, they draw enough publicity to pose this question for publishers: is it better to be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond? If Octavian Nothing had been published as an adult novel, would it have won a National Book Award? Maybe, but I wouldn’t have bet on it, whereas my money was on Octavian Nothing to win in the Young People’s Literature category even before the finalists were announced. The Book Thief actually was published as an adult novel in Australia. So what makes this a YA book here, especially when the main character is a child? Death — the narrator — is haunted by humans, and none haunt him so much as Liesel, a resourceful young girl in Nazi Germany who must use her talents for stealing books and telling stories to sustain her family, friends, and neighbors during the difficult days of World War II. Death is a striking choice of narrator — benevolent, omniscient, and philosophical — one who allows the reader to engage the story on an intellectual level as well as an emotional one. Death brings the setting and characters vividly to life with striking images and details, but also meanders through the plot with various asides, musings, and tangents — and yet for all the leisurely pacing and foreknowledge of the ending, there is an inexorable narrative pull at work, and the powerful entwined themes of literacy and survival push this beyond mere pathos into hope, inspiration, and resolution. The book engenders empathy and moral outrage, dovetailing nicely with the burgeoning social and political consciousness of teenagers. Its appeal in this regard is not unlike Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl or To Kill a Mockingbird. If there is some debate about the success of Zusak’s earlier I Am the Messenger, with its postmodern twist at the end, there can be none about The Book Thief: it is a highly ambitious book that succeeds on every level. M. T. Anderson is another brilliant young author. Known for his intelligent, offbeat YA novels even before Feed put him on the literary radar, Anderson, with his keen sense of social criticism and his masterly touch with language, has emerged as our leading practitioner of satire. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, a young African American boy, Octavian Nothing, has been brought up as a scientific experiment, one which will test the intellectual capacities of his race. Various narratives chronicle his dawning realization of his true station in life as the colonies move toward open rebellion, and the ironic hypocrisy of it all. The achievements of Octavian Nothing are all the more striking in contrast to Feed, as they showcase Anderson’s formidable talents in different genres. It’s hard to believe that the same author who penned the futuristic slang of Feed could also plunge us so thoroughly into the English language of eighteenth-century New England, that a chilling vision of the future can be matched — and perhaps exceeded — by a chilling vision of the past. Like The Book Thief, Octavian Nothing represents an ambitious, fully realized vision. For Aidan Chambers, how a story is told is just as important as the story itself, and he has been at the vanguard of experimentation in form, perspective, and subject matter. This Is All is written in the form of a Japanese pillow book — a collection of journals, poems, letters, stories, and thoughts — that pregnant nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn plans to share with her unborn daughter in the future. The book is essentially an eight-hundred-page character study. It is by turns compelling, tedious, sublime, ridiculous, transcendent, and ordinary. It covers a range of emotional, intellectual, and sexual territory with a degree of honesty that approaches voyeurism. Moreover, it is a book that is not at first what it seems to be. It is only as the novel winds to its denouement in the final pages that many of the narrative choices come to light, bearing witness in a powerful fashion, as do the Anderson and the Zusak, to those twin acts of literacy — reading and writing — and their ability to help us make sense of the chaos of our lives and more fully explore what it means to be human. These three novels model and exemplify most of the characteristics of the modern crossover novel. One of the most salient differences between young adult books and adult books is length. Historically, the YA novel has been characterized by its streamlined form, often to such a degree that Robert Cormier once remarked that he sometimes felt as if he were reading outlines for young adult novels rather than actual novels. Now the pendulum swings the other way. At just over 800 pages, This Is All is the longest YA novel in recent memory, and both volumes of Octavian Nothing will reputedly push that narrative to the 900-page mark. Short in comparison at just over 550 pages, The Book Thief still seems longer than anything else outside the fantasy genre. Indeed, such page counts are unprecedented for young adult realistic fiction, whether contemporary or historical, especially when none of these novels is as plot-driven as the doorstop fantasies. It is even more surprising that they should appear for a generation commonly thought to have a limited attention span. A more demanding and sophisticated use of language and increasingly experimental narrative forms distinguish the modern crossover novel, and once again these three novels — with their challenging vocabularies, highly stylized language, and interesting narrative structures — set a high bar for the field. These authors make no concessions and no compromises. They do not condescend to their readers, speaking to them as people rather than as teenagers. While the crossover novel does feature young characters, it also features plenty of adult characters, and often the themes and subjects addressed in these novels feel more mature as well. The crossover novel requires more serious concentration from young readers and helps move them from the pleasures of light reading to the pleasures of literary reading. The teenage years represent a turbulent phase of growth and change, and the problem novel has historically addressed and explored many of its aspects, but too often in a formulaic and unsatisfactory manner. Eschewing the model of the YA novel as a developmental tool for a discrete phase of life, the emerging literary fiction treats those teenage years as part of life’s continuum, and thus the novels in this tradition tend to be more artistic and less didactic than their forebears. They also allow for a fuller, more complex treatment not only of young people as they grow into maturity but also of their burgeoning awareness of the world around them. This Is All captures the annoyingly self-absorbed tendencies of adolescence, yet the immediacy of Cordelia’s first-person narrative is complemented by a more reflective commentary on a variety of issues — social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual — that are relevant and interesting to teens in their journey to adulthood. Likewise, Octavian Nothing has its moments of teenage angst, but they are contextualized by the unfolding horror of his personal situation, set against the momentous events leading up to the American Revolution. The Book Thief, with Death as its omniscient narrator (a clever rationale for a third-person with plenty of authorial asides), paints Liesel’s story on a similarly broad canvas. Indeed, these novels read not as history lessons on the Revolutionary War or Nazi Germany, nor as snapshots of the stormy seas of adolescence, but as lessons on humanity, meditations on human nature. They are literature in every sense of the word. All three represent a significant departure from the traditional YA novel. With the crossover novel, YA literature has come of age, but with the literary crossover novel — and that is how I would characterize The Book Thief, Octavian Nothing, and This Is All — young adult literature has matured into something virtually indistinguishable from the best adult literary fiction. This article will have gone to the printer before the ALA Midwinter conference, but I can well imagine the buzz and excitement that will swell the room in antici-pation of the announcement of the 2007 Printz Award and Honor books. The Book Thief and Octavian Nothing are both regarded as favorites, while This Is All is a long shot. But any recognition of these books will likely be seen as a validation of the direction in which YA literature is headed.
From the March/April 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
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he
annual press conference at which the American Library Association
announces its youth media award winners can be fraught with drama
and suspense. Take, for instance, the scenario that presented itself
just over three years ago when, after all of the Printz Honor books
had been announced, three of the most highly praised young adult
novels of the year had still not been mentioned. Only one of them,
presumably, would win. The other two would be left out of Printz
recognition completely. As fate would have it, Aidan Chambers’s
Postcards from No Man’s Land rather than M. T. Anderson’s
Feed or E. R. Frank’s America was held up
over the podium and announced as the winner. Of course, Feed had
been shortlisted for the National Book Award and would go on to
win the L.A. Times Book Prize and a Boston Globe–Horn Book
Honor citation, accumulating a cult following along the way; and
while America never enjoyed similar award success, the reviews were
laudatory and it acquired a sizable following with, arguably, the
broadest teen audience of the three.
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