Rock and Roll (Ned Vizzini)

A few years ago I took a MediaBistro crash course in newspaper writing and learned the term “evergreen.” My instructor promised us that our clips were evergreen — that is, if we ever wrote for a paper, it didn't matter if our piece was a week old or five years old: it could still get us our next job.

It turns out that certain topics for newspaper stories are evergreen as well. (The most obvious is Christmas. Literally evergreen. You can write about it every year.) In America, these stories often focus on teenagers, which makes sense because teenagers are a renewable resource and a convenient canvas for adult fears.

Teens occupy the position in our culture that women occupied in Victorian England. Back then it was understood that a woman should not show her ankles because it might prompt men to rape her. Today, it's understood a teenager should not play Grand Theft Auto because it might prompt him to become a rapist. Teens are paradoxically dangerous and helpless, over-sexualized and in need of protection, and they're who we talk about first when we talk about our problems.

So it's not surprising that sex and violence, perennial American pastimes, inform two popular evergreen teenage stories. One is the “kids are having wanton sex” exposé (examples: “Unsettling New Fad Alarms Parents: Middle School Oral Sex” from July 8, 1999; “Why Learning About Sex From the Web Comes With Drawbacks” from January 30, 2011). The second is the “teenagers corrupted by media” story, of which the Wall Street Journal essay that sprouted the #YASaves phenomenon is an example.

#YASaves is a big moment for young adult literature (we were a trending topic on Twitter, yo!) but in many ways the WSJ essay is the most credible and legitimizing aspect of the controversy. Prior to the 2000s, YA lit was simply not important enough to warrant WSJ attention. To find a “teenagers corrupted by media” story with a literary angle, one had to turn to academic publications. (The New Yorker found a great one in a 1985 issue of The English Journal.) The story was more widely applied to teen media that was actually popular: Judas Priest's allegedly suicide-inducing music, for instance, or the damnable antics of gangsta rappers.

But two books were published in 1999 that changed YA: Walter Dean Myers' Monster and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak. Each tackled an issue both hot-button and evergreen (urban violence and sexual assault) with the clarity and explicitness of literary fiction. The same year, Harry Potter hit bestseller lists in the US.

It's not often that an industry awakens artistically as it explodes commercially (rock and roll in the 60s comes to mind) but that's exactly what happened to YA in the 2000s. The fantasies of Harry Potter begat Twilight and The Hunger Games just as the realities of The Burn Journals and Tyrell changed an industry known in decades past for The Hardy Boys and The Babysitters Club. You had to go back to Judy Blume's Forever, or all the way to Catcher in the Rye, to find works that similarly challenged teen audiences in terms of language and content.

Those of us who were in the YA field during this time remember two iterations of the “teenagers corrupted by media” story. The first was in 1999, following Columbine, when media outlets questioned whether Harry Potter's relation to the occult had infiltrated the minds of the Trenchcoat Mafia. Then, in 2005, a book called The Rainbow Party was condemned as obscene for purporting to chronicle the phenomenon of teen oral sex parties.

The WSJ attack on YA books is different. After Columbine, everyone from Marilyn Manson to Magic: The Gathering was a target, so it's no shock that some school boards tried to lump in Harry Potter and newspaper editors picked up on their antics. As for The Rainbow Party, the book itself was a naked attempt to drum up publicity; the shameful thing is that it succeeded, no matter how fleetingly. (Rainbow parties remain an urban legend.) The WSJ piece, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere, brought forth simply by the popularity of YA literature.

For anyone who cares about young adult books, this is a time for celebration. For the last decade, as the adult book business has flatlined, YA has continued to challenge itself topically and grow financially in the face of video games, comic-book movies, and the internet. Now it has earned the kind of evergreen criticism that dogs pop stars and filmmakers.

I'm reminded of Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the evergreen Super Mario Brothers, quoted in defense of his chosen art form in a 2010 New Yorker profile: “Video games are bad for you? … That’s what they said about rock and roll!” The WSJ piece has the shrill tone of a jazz DJ smashing an Elvis record, so congratulations, YA authors: you are now rock stars.


Ned Vizzini is the author of three acclaimed young adult books: It's Kind of a Funny Story (also a major motion picture), Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah.... He has written about YA for the New York Times and the L Magazine. He recently contributed to the nonfiction Hunger Games collection The Girl Who Was on Fire and an essay of his will appear in Triumph of The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman's Zombie Epic on Page and Screen (Nov. 2011). His next novel, The Other Normals, will be published in fall 2012.