"Young adult" fiction

Over the past week -- which included travel time to San Diego, where I spent Thanksgiving, with only my Kindle for reading material --I've found myself re-reading three "young adult" novels by Benjamin Sáenz: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (which I "mini-reviewed" last May); He Forgot to Say Goodbye; and The Inexplicable Logic of My Life.

All three novels feature an introverted teenager, Mexican-American by birth or adoption, who is intelligent, kind, and sensitive, and who has a close relationship to one or both parents, but who nevertheless suffers from low self-esteem and whose instinctive reaction to frustration with others is to use his fists.  I assume I can draw some conclusions about Mr. Sáenz himself.  I assume these characteristics are to some degree autobiographical.

I think it's interesting -- and perhaps worthy of contemplation -- that I often enjoy YA fiction more than I do standard "adult" fiction.  I'm not talking about trashy adult pulp fiction, and I'm not talking about classics like Hemingway, Joyce, or Waugh.  Or Jane Austen, for that matter.  I'm also not talking about certain foreign writers who write in English, and may write about America and Americans from a foreigner's perspective.  Such as André Aciman.

I'm talking about those novels that are published week after week and are good enough to be reviewed by the New York Times, but that probably will never become "classics" that will be studied by future literature classes.

My thoughts are extremely tentative, and I need to think more about it.  But I suspect that an important factor in my mind, an important distinction between adult and YA fiction, is the presence of "hope."

The young people in YA fiction are often badly scarred by poverty, or upbringing, or lack of upbringing.  They may have made bad choices.  They may be overwhelmed in ways they don't understand by their teenage hormones.  But they have the resilience of youth. They have flexibility. And they have time, lots of time, to change course. Things may get better, and the novel may have a happy ending, or at least a bittersweet ending.  Or the novel may have a tragic ending, a warning to us readers that many children face odds that are stacked too heavily to be overcome.

But whether the end is happy or tragic, throughout our reading of the novel we feel hope, we care about the protagonist, we long for him to succeed.

Maybe you feel the same way about adult novels?  I rarely do.  I see protagonists with a long history of making bad decisions, stupid and selfish decisions, or who have already been overwhelmed by adversities beyond their control.  I don't particularly empathize with them, or particularly like them.  Their adult worries or desires seem trivial and uninteresting -- to me if not to themselves   But beyond my sympathy or lack of sympathy, I don't feel "hope."  I don't see any reason why -- at this stage of their lives, with so much polluted water already under the bridge -- their lives will be happier or more successful or more worthwhile or more helpful to others in the future than they have been in the past.

I know enough middle-aged people who have lost all the enthusiasms and dreams of their youth and are now just going through the motions of life that I'm not interested in reading about their fictional equivalents.

Therefore, I can't sustain my interest in most such novels, in the absence of some sensational extraneous feature -- they discover a pot of gold buried in the backyard! -- that makes the story less boringly predictable, if implausible.

I realize of course that the funny, clever, resourceful kid of today, the one who finds a way to attend his dream university despite all the odds against him, may well end up leading one of the tired, middle-aged lives of quiet despair tomorrow.  But that future's not in the YA novel.  I settle for whatever ending the author gives me, and don't try to second-guess the protagonist's future.

I'm not completely satisfied with the distinction I've drawn between YA and adult fiction.  I suspect I could find -- I suspect I've already read -- plenty of NY Times best-sellers that meet the characteristics I've given for good YA fiction, or that offer totally different reasons for me to find the books and their characters enchanting.

So I'll think about the subject some more.  Accept this as merely my "beta version" of contemplation on the subject.