Adolescent fiction: Writing for teenagers is now a fully-fledged genre with its own idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses, writes Robert Dunbar
While it is safe to assume that adolescents have been reading fiction for as long as there has been fiction to read, the idea that there is a body of literature which belongs exclusively to them, one which allegedly mirrors their own concerns and needs, is relatively new. Recent years, however, have seen such an increase in the material, particularly from America, Australia and Britain, that fiction for adolescents can definitely no longer be seen as merely an off-shoot of what is usually called "children's literature" and must be considered as a genre with stock characteristics, individual idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses of its own.
Much of this fiction, while perhaps reflecting adolescent experience, very rarely illuminates it. But at its best it does begin to throw some light on what Keats called "the poisonous time" between being a boy and being a man or between being a girl and a woman. In its short existence it has witnessed many fluctuating assumptions about what is appropriate for its young readers, both in subject matter and style. The possibilities and the limitations of the genre reside in the varied and rapidly changing ways in which society views these questions.
These matters assume a new relevance with the appearance from America of the first titles in what their publishers proclaim will be "an edgy and addictive series". Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl and You Know You Love Me (Bloomsbury, £5.99) are novels which focus on the hedonistic life-style of a group of New York teenagers whose privileged backgrounds allow them access to every imaginable material luxury. These young people's lives revolve around shopping, sex, smoking (pot) and school, in that order, and their choice of language to describe their indulgences is frank and uninhibited.
Surface would, initially, seem to be all there is. But the authorial tone and, especially, the voice of the omniscient narrator (a wryly entertaining website commentator on the proceedings) alert us to the fact that, glitzy trappings apart, this is a ruinously impoverished society. When, early in You Know You Love Me, we note that one of the teenagers is reading Sartre's No Exit, a book described by the narrator as "an existentialist tale of misfits in purgatory", we have a signpost as to where von Ziegesar is really taking us.
Earl Pryor, the 13-year-old hero of Chris Lynch's Who The Man (Bloomsbury, £5.99), is a "misfit" of the physical sort in that his premature bodily growth acts as a barrier between him and his contemporaries. More significantly, it serves to cause the sort of special problems succinctly summarized by his father when he comments, "Listen, my boy . . . You are in junior high, but your hormones are in college". In a novel which treads a delicate line between celebrating difference and delineating its potential traumas, Lynch paints a remarkable portrait of a young man grappling with his own emerging identity and learning - eventually - to settle for some measure of self-acceptance.
When we leave Daniel Zinkoff at the end of Jerry Spinelli's Loser (Collins, £4.99) he has his adolescence still ahead of him. His journey through junior school and his experience of the degree to which a succession of teachers has encouraged, accommodated or disapproved of his effervescent "difference" have ensured, however, that he has served a useful, if at times very disillusioning, apprenticeship. Developing the theme which he so successfully handled in Stargirl, Spinelli here deals humorously and poignantly with that kind of childhood irrepressibility which valiantly refuses to be cowed by conventional thinking and expectation, whether of the adult world or of less imaginative peers.
From these fictional portrayals of American adolescence we move, in Graham Gardner's Inventing Elliot (Orion, £7.99) to a "misfit" story with an English setting. For young teenager Elliot Sutton, moving to a new school seems at first to provide an opportunity for self-reinvention, following unhappy earlier experiences of bullying. In a developing scenario, which at its coldest and most intense has echoes of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, he finds himself, however, sucked into the corruption and malevolence of his new surroundings, where ultimately he has to make important choices: will the once bullied now become the bully or will nobler instincts prevail? If the resolution is, perhaps, predictable, it is not arrived at without, for Elliot, a considerable measure of anguish and self-analysis.
Dark as Gardner's world occasionally is, it does not quite attain the sinister note of Nicky Singer's extremely impressive Doll (Collins, £4.99). In a genre where the emphasis often seems to be on the complexities of father-son misunderstandings, it is refreshing to encounter a novel where at least two mothers (present or absent or, indeed, both) are given such central roles. When the destinies of their respective daughter and son, Tilly and Jan, become interwoven, we have a story which searingly probes beneath the surface of mother and child relationships and challenges preconceptions as to what "love" in these contexts might, or might not, mean. With its frequent references to stories and fairy tales and its moves between realistic and symbolic modes, Doll steers us towards questions about integrity and truth - and dissuades us from formulating easy solutions.
Finally, to a book which, its publishers assure us, "everyone will be talking about this summer". This is Melvin Burgess's Doing It (Andersen, £10.99), the author's long-promised "knobby book for boys", due to be published on May 1st and aimed at a readership of 16-plus.
Already, pre-publication, the novel has been causing consternation in the world of young adult fiction and has earned a devastatingly vitriolic review from Anne Fine, the British Children's Laureate, in the pages of last Saturday's Guardian. Fine rails against its publishers for "peddling this grubby book, which demeans both young women and young men" and, with the help of copious close quotation, parades the "vile, disgusting musings" entertained by the novel's three young male characters.
In fact, the book is not quite as irredeemably dreadful as Fine suggests.
Burgess has an ear well tuned to that particular variety of male adolescent sexual bragging which characterises the fearful, the uncertain and the insecure. There are some excruciatingly funny moments, some very well-realised set-pieces and some excellently re-created scenes of marital disintegration and its verbal violence. But virtually all of these merits are vitiated by the book's unnecessarily tasteless focus on matters anatomical, a focus which at times assumes an almost gynecological obsession with penile and vaginal detail. From someone with Burgess's totally deserved reputation as an author who has often challenged us to redefine our whole notion of young adult literature, this is a sad disappointment.
The novel is much less a celebration of young male sexuality than a too frequent reminder of how, in circumstances such as those described, it can become deadening and joyless.
Poisonous times, indeed.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines, Dublin