Debate: Why the Dystopian Trend in YA Lit?
Monday, January 24th, 2011 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoThe New York Times has an interesting discussion here on the growing trend for dystopian topics in Young Adult literature. Among the debaters are several YA authors, experts and professors. (Adding a young adult to that mix would probably have been appropriate as well.) Why are books like The Hunger Games so popular right now? The answers are diverse and interesting; the short essays by each contributor are well worth the read. For my money, though, there's another answer that none of the contributors touches on: the great majority of dystopian YA books contain sophisticated writing and content that shows the readers that the author respects them enough to not condescend. For example, The Hunger Games is a violent and scary book, and Collins doesn't pull any punches (pardon the euphemism), and therein is the key to its success. (If Collins had had the scenes shift away the fighting and violence instead of portraying it and its consequences honestly, the book would have been a lot less effective and popular.) Or, for another example, the His Dark Materials series contains some very complicated philosophical and religious themes that most YA books eschew. (Perhaps the failure of The Golden Compass as a movie lies with the fact that the screenplay completely abandoned these themes.) Young adults are just that: young adults, and as such, want to read works that treat them like adults, not idiots who just want simplified romance and toothless conflict.
I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia when I was about eleven. The themes and characters in that book rang incredibly true to me, and the death of one of the major characters was made all the more bittersweet because of the honesty the author treated it with. (The ensuing guilt and grief is raw and true, and entirely realistic.) The book did not have the falsely sweet, almost sing-songy, tone to it that other books dealing with death I'd read had. Terabithia gave me the knowledge necessary to deal with death when I did encounter it, and I can say I'm a better person for having read it. It wasn't a work of dystopia, per se, but it was serious and important without taking itself too seriously. Books like these wax and wane in popularity, but I think the serious side of YA will always be there, and it will always be necessary.
I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia when I was about eleven. The themes and characters in that book rang incredibly true to me, and the death of one of the major characters was made all the more bittersweet because of the honesty the author treated it with. (The ensuing guilt and grief is raw and true, and entirely realistic.) The book did not have the falsely sweet, almost sing-songy, tone to it that other books dealing with death I'd read had. Terabithia gave me the knowledge necessary to deal with death when I did encounter it, and I can say I'm a better person for having read it. It wasn't a work of dystopia, per se, but it was serious and important without taking itself too seriously. Books like these wax and wane in popularity, but I think the serious side of YA will always be there, and it will always be necessary.
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:05 pm (UTC)(I'll be reading The Hunger Games at some point this week because she recommended it, and then so did C. once I'd checked it out from the library and he read it in one fell swoop, and I have to return the book within the next week because someone else has a hold on it now.)
I just finished reading Gullstruck Island today and was very impressed with it. I very much recommend it - and it's another example of dealing with extremely complex issues in young adult format.
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:14 pm (UTC)I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on HG. It is a one-sitting read, and is definitely one that I talked back to as I read it. It's not pretty in many spots, and I'm still a little flabbergasted that the film production is going for a PG-13 rating, but we'll see what happens.
Gullstruck Island looks fantastic and I will definitely check it out.
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:19 pm (UTC)I agree with a lot of the commentators that this isn't actually a New Trend except perhaps for the explicitness of the violence (and sometimes the sex); as you say, kids like good writing about complex ethical choices.
Except they also like Twilight. Shrug. I mean, you could as easily write a piece about how YA literature these days is focused on the idea of finding true eternal love at 16 (see HP, Twilight, etc...) and what that says about "kids these days."
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:26 pm (UTC)The problem with that isn't so much its appearance in YA fiction in recent years, but the whole one true love indoctrination starts way younger with the whole fairy tale/disney princess phenomenon. I mean, I love me some Disney, but that trope bugs me on so many levels.
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:27 pm (UTC)I wonder how many readers actually like Twilight and how many are buying it simply to hear what the hype's about.
As for finding One Twu Luv at 16, yes, I'd love to read that column. Narratively speaking, I can understand it happening in HP (it would be weird to think that Harry, Ron, or Hermione ended up with a character we know next to nothing about) but in other books, it just seems forced and odd.
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Date: 2011-01-24 06:31 pm (UTC)I don't remember the corporal punishment really, but a) I grew up being spanked so chances are that made less of an impression on me b) for some reason that whole paddling by the headmaster idea didn't strike me as super fucked up until I saw Pink Floyd's The wall and was all wtf.
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Date: 2011-01-27 12:37 am (UTC)The world is a really big and uncertain place. Dealing with that in a microcosm of controlled fiction-in-a-book is reassuring, in its odd little way.
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