'I have been reading the poetry of my juniors," begins the Thom Gunn poem Expression. It goes on to evince weariness of expression itself. "Mother doesn't understand,/ and they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic/ … It is very poetic poetry." The speaker escapes from all this subjectivity in a museum, where a medieval altarpiece shows a stolid Virgin and Child, "devoid of expression." He finds that "The sight quenches, like water/ after too much birthday cake."
That poem was published in 1982, and was for some time after that the standard complaint against the creative writing of one's juniors: too self-absorbed, awfully self-pitying. Girls and boys alike wrote about being lonely and unpopular and bullied by the football team or the cheerleaders. It used to get repetitive, when one was going through 100 grant applications or contest entries. One always wanted to tell them to start making stuff up, maybe write stories in which something imaginary (and dramatic) happened.
I am starting to regret this. My dream has come all too true. The opposite is starting to happen. The standard set of themes and styles lacing applications for a fiction grant or a contest or entry to an academic program is now quite different from what they were even five years ago.
I have spent a week reading dozens of samples like these, from people who want to be writers, mostly in their 20s. There is still a predictable tranche of stories of sad childhood ("Daddy, the noted alcoholic"), but that segment is much narrower. What has come to dominate the writing of young people is futurist fantasy: Suddenly every third story is about a trek through the Dark Land to save the Last Breeder, or an escape from the Corporation that has banned poetry. There are violent deaths and giant fireballs. Even the short stories set in Canadian suburbs are tending to involve the supernatural or the dreamlike: There is a demon in the closet; the bathroom mirror starts to talk. It's a lot like reading stories for children.
This is new. The kind of person interested in breaking into literature 20 years ago tended to be rather more snobbish: She tended to see herself as an intellectual with an interest in the development of an art as a set of formal changes. She knew how Virginia Woolf wrote and how Alice Munro wrote and would place herself somewhere in that aesthetic continuum. In other words, technical issues – how a story was told, and how it could be told differently – were as meaningful to her as narratives were. There was more bad poetry, but fewer magical occurrences.
The new tropes are of course the result of the massive success of the Young Adult genre, something that can be described as a 21st-century fiction renaissance. Blockbuster fantasy planted in young people is blooming in adults, working its way up the chain into the academy itself. Here we have a generation of educated people nourished by Harry Potter and Twilight, by The Hunger Games and Divergent, now in university. They are using their imaginations in unprecedented ways: "Write what you know" is completely useless when you are describing a genetically engineered clairvoyant werewolf race (in a world where oxygen is rationed etc.).
I see this as genre fiction but I doubt that they see themselves as artistic conservatives. They see themselves rather as social critics. The political ideas that underlie dystopian spec-fic are usually critical of uniformity, admonitory about environmental degradation, suspicious of power. Heroes come from oppressed underclasses (and are usually marked by physical difference of some kind). In a way, the themes are not all that different from the jocks-versus-sads stories of the preceding cohort.
Many would say this move toward the event-filled, larger-than-life narrative is not a bad thing. It's certainly welcome news for a troubled publishing industry. The stories can be a lot of fun, and they grapple with big ideas rather than small personal memories. (Exactly what I used to encourage!) It's a move toward fun, a move away from archness and pretentiousness.
But this presumes archness isn't fun. The language of the teen novel is invariably workmanlike. There is no sense of play in it, no sense that a clever sentence – a sentence that is dryly witty, or paradoxical, or casually passes off a shocking perspective, or one that is merely elegantly concise – is the source of reading's pleasure.
I just this morning read these sentences of John Updike, about his golf swing: "A divot the size of an undershirt was taken some 18 inches behind the ball. The ball moved a few puzzled inches." An undershirt! Puzzled inches! That, to me, is fun, sheer pleasure, the pleasure of a powerful drug. Just as much fun as the murder of Lord Darkbone by the Outlanders.
The teen paranormal genre will of course mature as its fans do, and there will be literary experiments happening inside its structural confines that will quite possibly explode it completely. I am impatient for that to happen, because for now, a preoccupation with content seems dominant over form, and it is leaving us with an incomplete idea of what literature is.