Scraping the bottom of Pandora’s box

Someone recently referred me to thisWall Street Journal article about the increasingly horrifying levels of sex, violence, and generally objectionable behavior in young-adult fiction. They also included this set of YA author Libba Bray’s tweets on the subject of the same article, where she proclaims that this sort of reporting encourages those who ban books and try to keep controversial material out of the hands of young people who need the ideas it contains.

I agree with Ms. Bray, except when I don’t.

First, a statement of general policy. I don’t like book banning. I don’t like the idea that some people get to tell other people what they can and can’t read, unless the people doing the telling are copyright holders (who, in my view, have a complete right to control who does and does not see the material they produce, at least initially).

But I qualify that view in a very select set of circumstances—and parents selecting books for their children fall into one of those categories.

Don’t get me wrong—I think parents who try to keep everything remotely controversial away from their kids are missing the point of parenting. My mom used to tell me she wasn’t raising chickens for Colonel Sanders; she was raising eagles to fly. Before an eagle can fly, it needs a basic understanding of the world it flies in—at least when it comes to things like gravity. If you’re preparing your kids to be adults, you need to expose them to adult ideas at some point.

But that’s at some point. And one kid’s some point is not another’s.

Some kids can handle the bad stuff earlier than others, and it’s part of a parent’s job to figure out when a kid is ready for something. They won’t always do that job perfectly, which is why I encourage kids to seek out books that interest them and worry about reading levels and the like later. But where parents can provide guidance and context, they should. And if that means deciding a 13-year-old isn’t quite ready for Speak, then maybe it’s okay to wait until age 14 or 15. I’m not saying teens should never read a book like Speak; I’m saying some of them should wait longer than others to do so. And parents are better-equipped than many other people to determine their children’s maturity level.

My parents had a pretty liberal policy when it came to what we kids could read. Basically, as long as we stayed out of trouble and didn’t have violent nightmares about what we read, we were free to read whatever we liked. And so, despite growing up in the 1990s, when young-adult fiction was barely a twinkle in the publishing world’s eye and books for kids were a lot less graphic, I learned about a lot of scary grown-up concepts well before my peers did. By age 10, I knew a fair bit about rape, just from reading books for grown-ups and an article in, of all things, Reader’s Digest. By age 12, I had read enough Andrew Vachss to know a few things about child prostitution in Asian tourism, which alarmed my teachers like you wouldn’t believe. I read widely from my local library, with the result that my typical reading list might combine a book on human sacrifice with a manual on how to carve carousel horses. And though I had terrifying nightmares as a child, they were almost never the result of anything I read. Not even the carousel-horse books.

Now, I wouldn’t hand those books to an average twelve-year-old—certainly not my average classmate in the sixth grade. I could well imagine some of my peers having vivid nightmares about some of the things I read—or worse, going out and trying them out of sheer curiosity. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have been allowed to read them. It just means that I was on the high end of the maturity curve for my age, and read accordingly. Similarly, I think kids who can handle the kind of darkness common in a lot of YA fiction should be allowed to read it if they want. Prior restraint—a fancy legal term for banning something before it’s happened—is not justified when it comes to kids in general reading books in general.

There is, however, one element of the WSJ article with which I agree. It’s not a cause for book banning, but I’d like to submit it as something for particularly daring YA authors to tackle. These relentlessly grim books lack something that I think is a crucial part of the teenage literary diet: hope.

I’m not saying every YA book needs to have a happy ending. But some of the dark ones should include, somewhere in them, a lessening of suffering. When you’re fifteen or sixteen years old, there are a lot of things in your life you can’t control. You usually can’t do anything about your parents acting insane, or the kids at school treating you like garbage, or the thousand-and-one things that seem to be wrong with your body. You need hope, whether you know it or not.

I remember my teenage years as a dark, crushing weight of hopelessness pressing down on my back, lightened only when I could escape into a story. I was never going to have any friends; I was never going to be loved or accepted; I was never going to be good enough for anyone to value me at all. I had been bullied consistently since I was eight years old, and the world around me seemed designed to support my tormentors. So while I didn’t go looking for hope (I didn’t think there was any to be had), I needed it. I secretly treasured stories where the good guys won, or at least didn’t completely lose, because it helped me think about my life in a way that made me want to change it. I read about characters who spat in fate’s eye, and learned to do that myself. So what if I wasn’t pretty enough, or popular enough, or from a rich family? I was smart, and I was stubborn, and I could be brave, and that might take me somewhere better than the place where I stood. So I kept writing, and made friends, and stood up to people who tried to break me. Stories, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, taught me that dragons could be killed.

Adults know that you can’t beat every monster, slay every dragon, right every wrong. But if we think we can’t fix any of that, we don’t try. And more monsters rise, and claim more victims.

So while none of my heroes have an easy road, there’s always at least a glimmer of hope that things might get better, that somebody can make a difference somehow. It would be nice if the doom-and-gloom patrol in YA fiction would take on that challenge.

Perhaps we’d all do well to remember the words of Robert A. Heinlein: “The last thing to come out of Pandora’s box was Hope.”

A little fragment I'm proud of ...

A friend recently sent me the photo above, with a note attached: "I'm not sure whether this is Rorschach or the Black Mask ... thoughts?" It reminded me of this passage in Chapter 3, where Trevor searches Rae's hideout, which used to be the Black Mask's, and finds an old fedora that could only belong to one person …

It wasn’t everyone who could wear a trenchcoat and fedora in the waning nights of the twentieth century, but that was the Black Mask for you. It helped that he had haunted Los Angeles since before the talkies were a glimmer in Al Jolson’s eye, but that was only part of his mystique. The Black Mask knew everything, about everyone. He kept files on generations of city governments, whispered in the ears of industrialists and studio chiefs, came and went from police headquarters like a wraith. There were almost no photos, few recordings of the gravelly voice behind the black facecloth — the sound of oil and broken glass, one unauthorized biographer had called it — but everyone knew he was there. The crimes no one could solve, the powerful men no one could touch, the shadows no one could penetrate … they melted away before him like morning fog. Maybe he had powers, maybe he didn’t; it never mattered.

When capes and tights sprouted around him like weeds and the heroes went from front-page news to scandal-sheet trash, he stuck to the trenchcoat and the shadows and the truth. Even the most devout powers snobs steered clear of him, never questioned his right to exist. In other cities, they were metas and superheroes and mysterymen and capes; here they were masks, and could be nothing else. The girl took advantage of that. Ten years after the mysterious explosion that took his life, his hideout was still drawing free electricity from the grid, and no cop in the city would risk pulling over a black Indian with his plates. Just in case. Just in case.

Trevor remembered when he wanted to be the Black Mask someday.

Beating the dragon

The New York Times recently posted a piece that’s either very perceptive or blindingly obvious about the recent proliferation of bad or absent parents in young-adult fiction. (You can read it here.) The upshot is that YA fiction has recently turned up with a veritable swarm of adults who range from missing or merely negligent to full-on abusive or so helpless that their kids are doing the parenting. There’s a bit of hand-wringing over this, and it reminded me of my very first reader snit over the portrayal of parents in my own writing.

The reader having the snit was my father.

I was about seventeen, and I had been getting fan mail from readers for two years and my parents were beginning to realize that I might be serious about this writing thing. (For the record, I hadn’t realized it—I tried rather hard to have any career but writing until I found myself in grad school and unable to find any other kind of work. Really, it’s lucky that I love writing more than any other job in the world.) I refused to let my parents read my work at the time, for what I thought was a very good reason—I believed it was terrible. Even as a child, I had judged my writing by the most adult standard possible. I used to tell my English teachers, “Don’t tell me my writing’s good for a twelve-year-old. Tell me if it’s good. If you read it in a bookstore, would you buy it?” (I realize now what a terrible thing that is to say to a teacher, and I hereby apologize to all the teachers I caused to fear for my sanity—and no, I don’t know why I was so fixated on writing at an adult level when I insisted I didn’t want to be a professional writer. Maybe I was trying to master it and get it out of my system?) And while I was willing to burden my friends with my childish efforts at storytelling, I wouldn’t dream of bothering the two very busy adults in my life with such frivolity. Bad enough they insisted on going to my school plays. Besides, Mom didn’t read much for pleasure and Dad stuck strictly to nonfiction and murder mysteries, so what point was there in sharing my superhero adventures with them? They didn’t enjoy the genre even when it was done well.

This all seemed very logical to me, and it apparently convinced my father that I was hiding something. He pulled me aside one day and told me that I was, by God, going to put his name on my e-mail distribution list because “your mother thinks you’re writing pornography, and that’s why you don’t want us to see it.” I rolled my eyes and added him to the list, deeply annoyed. I thought that once he noticed my stories were nothing but juvenile humor, superheroic slap-fights, and adolescent attempts at emotional depth, he’d leave me alone and probably stop reading them altogether.

Stop laughing. Everybody’s allowed to be stupid at seventeen. It’s in the rules somewhere.

A few weeks later, he called me into his office and sat me down for a stern talking-to. Why, he wanted to know, were Rae’s parents absent from the story? Trevor was an orphan, and most of the other teenage characters were orphans, runaways, or the products of such nasty home lives that they were blasé about deceiving their parents and guardians about what they did all night on the city’s rooftops. Only Rae seemed to come from a stable nuclear family, and yet her folks barely got a sentence in any given chapter. Was I trying to make some veiled statement about my own family?

I rolled my eyes again. (I was a champion eye-roller.) The answer seemed obvious to me, but Dad kept pestering until I finally said, "It’s because I don’t want to write about parents. DUH!”

And I didn’t. I still don’t, really—at least, not normal, well-adjusted parents. My relationship with my own parents has always been complex, and I frankly didn’t want anyone trying to read anything into that relationship based on my writing—so I left them out. It seemed the best way to protect my privacy, and besides, what kind of parents would support their offspring’s desire to throw themselves off rooftops anyway? I’ll tell you what kind—the bad kind! Any good parents in my stories had to be lied to and excluded, or they’d stop all the interesting parts of the story from happening.

YA literature now, of course, overflows with bad parents. Is it because it’s natural for teenagers to see their parents as enemies and obstacles? I don’t remember seeing mine that way (well, except when they thought I was writing porn). My folks’ greatest offense while I was in high school was my father’s unconscionable decision to have a heart attack on a business trip three days before the school production of Our Town opened with me in a leading role. And frankly, I hated that production so much that I was glad Mom had to fly out of town to be with him. I was an orphan on opening night, and I liked it that way. Likewise, my friends all had pretty good relationships with their folks, although a couple of parents really lost it when we went off to college.

Perhaps there’s something about being a teenager that makes you want bad parents if you don’t have them—it’s part of having the kind of romantic, adventurous life you don’t have time for between a mountain of homework and a 24-7 activity schedule. It was kind of fun to have all my friends fussing over me when I was an opening-night orphan, though it probably would have been less fun if Dad had actually been in danger rather than just unable to board an aircraft.

But mostly I think the choice is a matter of narrative convenience. Good parents try to protect their children from dangerous adventures for as long as possible. Mine were more laissez-faire than most—I was allowed to ride my bike down a busy street or play in the flood-control channel or feed my lunch to stray animals as long as I didn’t get seriously hurt—but I do think they would have eventually noticed if I’d started showing up with bruises or climbing out my bedroom window at midnight. If Rae’s parents were around enough to notice she was constantly getting injured or running off at all hours to spend time with a scruffy teenage runaway, they’d ground her until she was eligible for Social Security. And what good is a book like that?

Masks, like most YA books, is at least partly a coming-of-age story, a tale of characters making the transition from carefree childhood to adult responsibilities—or, in Rae’s and Trevor’s cases, from childhood responsibilities to adult responsibilities. That means disconnecting from the mothership for a while and finding out who you are when nobody’s looking over your shoulder. Trevor began making that transition when he was six years old and realized that, no matter how unfair it was, he was the only person who could keep Jude out of the morgue and himself out of foster care. Rae took her first step on that journey at age eight, when she found out what happens when there are no adults around to look out for you. By the time they meet, they are doing the jobs of adult heroes because there are no adult heroes around to do them. Partly, that’s narrative necessity—would adult superheroes willingly leave the world in the hands of a pair of powerless wannabes too young to vote?—and partly it’s because of a truth of adolescence that most parents prefer not to acknowledge.

Namely, that here there be dragons.

Before my high school graduation, every single teenager I knew had run into at least one situation that most adults would consider above a kid’s pay grade. Sometimes it was the sudden death of a classmate. Sometimes it was addiction or abuse. Sometimes it was a relationship gone horribly wrong. Sometimes it was an act of God, like an earthquake or a flood with terrible consequences. Sometimes it was a seemingly ordinary day that just went bad, and there was nothing to do but stop the bleeding, pick up the pieces, and wait for the cops, the paramedics, or the coroner to arrive.

I lived in one of the good neighborhoods, but by the time I graduated I or my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances had seen grim death by cancer and car wreck; abuse by parents, employers, and loved ones; two chronic medical conditions that could kill their sufferers at any time; a little light terrorism; a near-fatal eating disorder; assorted hijinks with drugs, alcohol, and sexual stupidity; a nice range of mental illness; and enough fires and other disasters to fill a season of daytime TV. We were, for the most part, the lucky ones, the “good kids” who kept our noses clean, studied hard in a good school, stayed out of gangs and off drugs, and tried to make something of ourselves. It didn’t stop us from walking down the wrong street or opening the wrong door. I think we still have video somewhere of one of us helping to amputate a guy’s leg with a saw. Life happens.

Parents usually aren’t there for that. Sometimes they show up at the ER later, but they’re not there when you have to make a choice that will set the course for the rest of your life. That falls to you. The most important test you take is the one whose date isn’t on the calendar. That’s what happens in Masks--the world needs saving, and the grown-ups aren’t there. I love reading science fiction, a genre whose authors believe they can prepare us for the future if they just tell enough interesting stories about it. That’s what I try to do in Masks. I know my readers will have to face those unexpected crises, if they haven’t already, and they’ll face some of them alone. I want them ready. Rae and Trevor hear screaming, and run toward it. I don’t expect my readers to do the same—but I want them to think about what they’ll do before the screaming actually starts.

The great Victorian author G.K. Chesterton was once asked whether he thought children should have fairy tales read to them, since they were full of darkness and violence and monsters and they ultimately weren’t “true”. His reply was memorable: “Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Is it so wrong to hand St. George a sword?