"Let's Play a Game: 5 of..."

One of the great joys of hosting Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday is working with great people who work tirelessly to teach adolescents and promote, study, and critique young adult literature. This week we have a special Friday edition contributed by Stacy Graber. She a faculty member in the English Department of Youngstown State University, a proud graduate of Arizona State University, and contributed twice in the past. You can find those posts here and here. This week Stacy discusses books that were written for adults, but might easily have been YA. This is a topic that many of discuss frequently and Stacy adds to the conversation. Thank you Stacy.

As all parents do, I used to play games to occupy my son on car rides that seemed interminable by a kid’s internal GPS, and one of the games was “5 of…” which gave my son a mental workout and offered me an opportunity to do one of my favorite things: make lists.  In retrospect, maybe it was a fetishization of categories, a transparent celebration of order, Linnaeus-style.  The game went like this: Name 5 kinds of trees, spices, fish, etc.  I happily sorted the world into groups of five examples and I created lighter quiz questions for the kid like, name 5 states, rivers, or musical instruments.  We amused ourselves that way on the 50 minute drive to the high school where I worked at the time, unless there was a rainstorm, in which case we pretended we were gods who could stop the downpour at will by commanding the heavens at the exact moment when driving under an overpass.

I was thinking about the 5 of… game while driving along the 224, the main artery between the cities of Canfield and Poland in Northeastern Ohio.  The drive can be tedious unless you create little challenges for yourself like arranging the world in categories by attributes.  On this occasion, I asked a work-related question that I resolved to answer in the time it took to drive past the wild bird feed store: Name 5 titles of books written for an adult audience that might have been dually categorized as young adult literature, but were published before the extreme moment of popularity of the genre.
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Now, we might debate over the definitional criteria for the task, but I believe that I have arrived at four serious contenders for such a list based on specific aspects of appeal for adolescent readers, and I invited a few of my colleagues from the English Department at Youngstown State University to supply a fifth title. 

​#1: John Updike, The Centaur (1962).  This dreamy mash-up of mythology and small town, ethnographic lore features a high school science teacher who imagines he is Chiron the Centaur.  In chapter one, the Golden Age tutor to Achilles/Pennsylvania pedagogue has taken an arrow to the fetlock/ankle, and he listens to the clatter of his hooves on school linoleum.  The fantastic drama of the opening scene establishes the seamless drift between the imagined and real lives lived by a father and his 15 year old son.  This book reads like YAL primarily due to the passages in which Peter, the Centaur’s son, painfully describes his embarrassment over his father’s idiosyncratic antics and suffers the catalogue of personal failures his father recites throughout the text.  At the same time, the description of Peter’s skin condition (psoriasis), which seemingly prevents him from being the Byronic hero of his own life, is rendered so authentically that the reader understands well what it feels like to be branded an outcast by school kids for physical difference.  

​#2: Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast (1982).  Another text featuring a father-son conflict, this book pits 14 year old Charlie Fox against his frustrated, visionary, and unrelenting father who transports his family to Honduras in search of a haven from materialism and utopia inaccessible in capitalistic America.  The book is intensely allusive, in constant conversation with classic texts such as Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Lord of the Flies.  And, though many critics read the father’s character as a gigantic whacko, his critiques sound with meaning for this reader raised on the writing of John Berger, and for young Charlie who wants to believe in his dad’s potential to humanistically remake the world.  Kids would appreciate the way the book weaves energetically between genres: bildungsroman, horror, and travelogue.  Furthermore, birds haven’t looked so scary since Hitchcock, and they loom menacingly throughout the text as the ill-omened “scavengers” (Theroux, 1982) materialized from the father’s nightmares.  These raptors are feathered doppelgangers for the rapacious entrepreneurs and insatiable consumers the father longs to escape.   

​#3: William Wharton, Birdy (1978).  Speaking of birds… This book centralizes one of the most critical features of youth: The ability to invest so wholly and imaginatively into something (e.g., a hobby, a subject, an animal), that the world dissolves except for the fantasy life that emerges from the creative endeavor.  In Wharton’s tale, we follow a young man who kids call “Birdy” from age 13 to 17 as he becomes a hobbyist dedicated to raising canaries.  This activity rapidly develops into an obsession as it fuses with Birdy’s desire to fly, ostensibly to escape a violent and oppressive childhood on the streets of Philadelphia.  Ultimately, in the manner of Cortázar’s (1952) remarkable work of magical realism, Axolotl (full text in Spanish and English here) Birdy straddles an existence something between bird and human.  The book “hops” between the past and present with the agility of a robin (one of the author’s observations of bird-kind), as Birdy’s account is spliced with reminiscence from his childhood friend, Al Columbato, who is enlisted to bring Birdy back to reality. 

​#4: Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983).  This macabre, surrealistic nightmare portrait of a carnival family is paradoxically fused with a poignant, mother-daughter parallel narrative.  The Binewski brood consists of a group of children specially engineered as sideshow attractions by the Ring Master, Al Binewski, and his wife, “Crystal Lil,” a celebrated circus geek.  Braided with the ultra-violent historical account of the rivalry between the Binewski siblings, ages 10 to 18, is the present-day story of (adult) Olympia Binewski, as she attempts to protect her daughter from a psychotic frozen-food heiress with money sufficient to bankroll illicit surgeries proposed to “save” young women from the ruinous attention of men.  Although Roper (2014) attributes the book’s fascination for young people, in part, to its meta-conversation on the gifts of comic book characters, I think kids (--too often the victims of cruel social sorting) would more immediately recognize Dunn’s critique of the de-legitimization of bodies deemed “socially unacceptable.”  This book exacts a ferocious, Stephen King-like vengeance for the smug entitlement of “norms,” as most people are referred to by the Binewski children.    

As for the fifth book in the grouping, I will provide some of the titles recommended by colleagues in the Youngstown State University English Department:

Dr. Tiffany Anderson: James Baldwin (1974), If Beale Street Could Talk
Dr. Rebecca Barnhouse: Robert Heinlein (1961), Stranger in a Strange Land
Dr. Gary Salvner: Charles Dickens (1850), David Copperfield
 
My hope is that the reader of this article might (also) propose a fifth title.
Please direct all correspondence to: [email protected]

Selected References
Roper, C. (2014, March). Geek love at 25: How a freak family inspired your pop culture heroes.  Wired Magazine.  Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2014/03/geek-love/