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children / adolescents
The ever-vigilant Judith sends me a list of novels which prominently feature children, including:
The Everlasting Story of Nory by Nicholson Baker
The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Saskiad by Brian Hall
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
And she also usefully points out that the worlds of juvenile and young adult literature of course feature representations of children by the barrel-load. Which begs the question: what is the best juvenile / young adult literature out there?
I'm fond of A Wrinkle In Time, myself, and I enjoyed The Golden Compass, the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy—although, being fantasy/SF, these books don't exactly have the stamp of "realism" that I'm looking for. Francesca Lia Block is closer.
Related: I had the opportunity on my recent roadtrip to flip through the Dave-Eggers-edited The Best Non-Required Reading 2002, a collection marketed (interestingly) to people between the ages of 15 and 25. The final piece in the collection is a selection from high schooler Zoe Trope's controversial Please Don't Kill the Freshman, published by Future Tense Books (and soon to be reprinted by Harper Collins). What struck me about the bits of it that I read is not so much its originality, but rather the fact that it rang incredibly similar to the writing of a few students that I've had in my fiction classes, also young, precocious women. These writers tend to be startlingly incisive about particular topics (largely gender and sexual politics) and they also tend to share a similar style (terse, clipped prose and a tendency towards stream-of-consciousness and abandonment of standard grammatical convention), and I'm beginning to see it as a kind of decentered movement instead of just a few isolated cases. Who or what are the common influences on these women? (I sense Bukowski in the mix somewhere.) This interview is not particularly illuminating. Labels: book_commentary |
Friday, May 16, 2003
11:54 AM
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