Coming of Age on the Printed Page : Some give young adult fiction an ‘A’ for the familiar voice it gives young people. Others flunk it for ‘dumbing down’ literature.

Paul Zindel never set out to make cultural history. So he was as surprised as anyone when he ended up a hero in the literary potboiler that became known as young adult fiction.

That chapter in Zindel’s career opened in the mid-’60s, when his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds,” was making a splash in theatrical circles. One of the zillions who saw it was Charlotte Zolotow, a legendary editor and author at Harper & Row. She saw beyond the play’s portrait of a brutal mother and her two anguished daughters to a resonantly true voice that had only rarely been heard in fiction--the Angst- filled adolescent.

“She asked me if I had any stories to tell for young people,” says Zindel. “She saw that in my work before I was aware of it. I said, ‘I do,’ because I had been a chemistry teacher on Staten Island for 10 years and I’d kept notes on the kids, which should have told me I was interested in the kids, but I didn’t know.”

His faculty for student-speak materialized in his 1968 novel, “The Pigman,” a cruelly realistic tale of friendship, betrayal and death told from the perspective of two high school outsiders. The book helped spawn a new literary genre--young adult fiction.

Indeed, the turbulent ‘60s saw not only the emergence of the new brash voice of youth but also a literature to contain it--and, when it was very, very good, to give it immortality. Seminal young adult novels such as S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” and Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War” have joined “The Pigman” on middle-school reading lists nationwide. Educators hope to lure kids into the elusive reading habit with books that hold up a mirror to their own often fractured lives.

“What those books have in common are . . . someone feeling isolated, alone, misunderstood, separate, alien from authority, and that seemed to be the beginning of what became known as the world of young adult books,” says Beverly Horowitz, editor in chief of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Books for Young Readers Division.

Young-adult-paperback sales have soared over the years--Time magazine reported a 300% jump in a two-year stretch in the early ‘80s--partly because of the wild popularity of softcover series and teen horror novels (a relatively new subgenre that sprang up in the wake of Stephen King’s huge teen following). But sales of hardcovers, primarily bought by schools and libraries, have declined, publishers say, partly because young adult fiction goes first when public-library budgets are slashed. As childhood seemingly gets shorter, so too, the age of the genre’s audience has gradually dropped from high school to middle school and even younger.

While young adult fiction’s essentially linear plots have come under fire from critics who complain they’re simplistic, the same quality has captured the eye of Hollywood for its storytelling ease. The current monster hit “Mrs. Doubtfire” sprang from the young adult novel “Alias Madame Doubtfire” by Anne Fine, and other novels of the genre resulted in such critically esteemed films as “The Outsiders,” featuring a younger Matt Dillon and Tom Cruise, and “Gas, Food, Lodging.”

“The case for (young adult fiction) is that people want to read about themselves,” says Roger Sutton, executive editor of the University of Illinois’ Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.

Karen Velasquez, 13, an eighth-grader at Southgate Middle School, says that’s precisely why she reads teen fiction.

“Adult books don’t tell much about kids, so I just read teen-ager books,” she says. “Sometimes they teach lessons of what we’re going through during our teen years, like people making fun of you because of the way you are. It makes me feel that there are other people going through the same things I’m going through.”

Young adult fiction (YA, in the trade) came of age at a time when the divorce rate was spiking, when drugs and experimental sex were burrowing into a typical adolescence. And novels that gave that tumultuous reality an accurate voice have sometimes been controversial, drawing criticism from some educators, some religious groups and some parents. Censorship attempts have peppered the field.

“I gave a presentation in Missouri and talked about the most exciting books in 20 years,” Sutton says. “A woman came up and was telling me, ‘Thanks for telling me what not to buy in my library.’ She’d get in trouble if she bought books about homosexuality or two kids smoking a joint and nothing happened.

“I said, ‘Have you ever had trouble?’ And she said, ‘No, because I’m careful.’ She’s dug herself that pit.”

Grown-ups had less to fret about in the decades before the genre’s birth. With the rare exception of such feisty coming-of-age novels as “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, and “Lord of the Flies,” by William Golding, considered YA’s spiritual forebears, typical teen novels were formulaic morality tales meant to control unruly youth. Novels by such ‘50s and early ‘60s authors as Rosamond du Jardin and Betty Cavanna sided with parents, who of course, always knew best.

Which was nothing like the lives adolescents were living by the ‘60s.

“If you look at ‘The Pigman,’ it’s about two kids who befriend an old man (Mr. Pignati) and betray him,” Sutton says. “That shows how little parents have to do with teen-age social interaction. The last person you’ll confide in when you’re 17 is your parent.”

In fact, some earlier works were criticized for casting all adults as bad guys. Because YA fiction is not merely literature about youth and for youth, it has to have a certain raw, adolescent sensibility, the ambiguous teen’s eye view.

While the rise of youth culture created a power base for that perspective, the concurrent preeminence of TV created a life vacuum to accommodate it.

“Television was becoming the third parent, the only parent that militated against reading but also created a loneliness which softened up young people for reading,” says award-winning YA author Richard Peck. “It’s a warmer and more intimate relationship than television.”

In his forthcoming examination of YA fiction, “Love and Death at the Mall: Teaching and Writing for the Literate Young,” Peck writes: “We were to create a literature of family life for a generation who didn’t have to be home on a school night, or had no home. It would be a literature of fathers for the fatherless, a literature to question girls who thought they had to demean their mothers in order to be women. A literature of the young looking everywhere for the stroking and structure of family.”

Peck had an orchestra seat on adolescence as a middle- and high-school teacher in New York, a vocation that, not surprisingly, has sprouted many YA authors. He left his job in frustration in 1971 and tried his hand at fiction that would corral his former pupils’ interest. The result was “Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt,” later filmed as “Gas, Food, Lodging.”

Peck has continued to guide kids through the minefields of adolescence in his 18 YA novels, taking an unflinching look at such issues as peer-group pressure, teen suicide and rape.

“I have an instructive agenda because I’m an old schoolteacher,” Peck says. “I’m always thinking, ‘What’s my lesson?’ My first message is ‘Books can be about you’ and that can be exciting for some kids, the idea that fiction is not reality with the names changed, but that fiction is this parallel reality in which you can learn something true about life. Because they don’t know those things. They’ve read very little. I get letters from kids who say, ‘Yours is the first novel I’ve ever read.’

“My other agenda you see in the background is the continual challenge of the power of the peer group, because it’s even more mighty today. The peer group leader now has the power over you that parents used to. That should call for the whole literature questioning it. Are you going to be led by people no more mature than yourself? Will you let them tell you how to dress, how to appear, who to hate?”

The helping hand inherent in much of YA--replacing the generational swat--draws praise from admirers of the genre.

“I sincerely like YA books,” says Elizabeth Devereaux, who reviews them for Publishers Weekly. “There’s something about YA fiction that’s different from adult fiction. Very often there’s this generous impulse prompting it. You have an adult writer wanting to pass something on to younger people. I don’t think sincerity is a literary virtue, but there’s a generosity of spirit that I warm to.”

But some critics complain that YA fiction goes too far in catering to its sometimes reluctant audience, that it oversimplifies prose and contemporary issues so much that kids learn the wrong lesson.

“It’s not something people want to talk about, the dumbing-down of literature,” says Mary Warner Marien, a fine-arts professor at Syracuse University, who made that controversial case in the Christian Science Monitor. “You create intolerance for difficult language, and for difficulty itself. Some ideas are hard to understand--you have to read them several times, but not these books. I read one waiting on line at the bank. They go like melting butter.”

Author Bernie MacKinnon found that when one of his YA efforts was judged too challenging, it went unrewarded. His first novel, “The Mean Time,” an exploration of racial friction that weighed in at 181 pages, was named to the American Library Assn.’s list of best books for young adults from 1966 to 1986. He spent 3 1/2 years on his second novel, “Song for a Shadow,” more than 300 pages of fiction about generational conflicts. But when the novel came before an ALA awards committee, its length knocked it out of the running.

“Everyone I hear had good things to say about it, but they thought it was too long,” MacKinnon says. “I was given to understand that that’s what tripped it up.”

MacKinnon agrees that YA authors feel some pressure to over-streamline issues.

“There’s a burden on adults to take a didactic role with the young,” he says. “Even though we often don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, we want to be able to hand out unambiguous law. And in this, religion gets into the act, P.C. (political correctness) gets into the act . . . what’s currently perceived as the healthiest, just ways of thinking that don’t lend themselves to an ambiguous view of an essentially ambiguous world.”

While its defenders acknowledge a broad spectrum of quality in YA, as in any genre, broad-brush criticism of its usefulness in literacy raises hackles.

“Some people paint (the state of youth literacy) as disastrous,” says Dale Buboltz, a teacher-librarian at Southgate Middle School. “I don’t think it’s disastrous. Do I care if a kid is reading material off a computer screen? Doesn’t bother me. Sears Roebuck catalogue? Doesn’t bother me. Comic books? No.

“A lot of well-intentioned adults are excluding reading material when our real task should be to encourage reading of all kinds, because you can get to a point in this society where you do no reading, or very little reading. And that’s where you have the problem.”

Some YA authors complain that many adults are so dismissive of the genre that it’s unfairly tagged as “the B-team of literature,” as author Chris Lynch put it in School Library Journal.

“The music industry treats the 16-to-19-year-old group as an important, powerful consumer block,” Lynch writes. “So does the fashion industry. So does the film industry. The publishing industry? There is enough skepticism about late-teen fiction that the store I frequent most in Boston does not stock a single hardcover title in the young adult section.”

Even Zindel, one of the titans of the field, found himself dissed as a YA author during a BBC radio program. He recalls the interviewer asking him, “ ‘One of these days, do you think you will write a proper book?’

“I should have called him on that. I said, ‘I have written for adults, if that’s what you mean.’ ”

HarperCollins editor Antonia Markiet believes that nose-thumbing attitude says more about the adults who adopt it than it does about the work.

“That’s a reflection of our society’s view of children, which is a B-class human being, that they’re stupid, that they’re limited, that they don’t understand, that they don’t feel as strongly,” she says. “It trickles down. Our attitude toward our kids affects what we do for kids. Movies are silly and trite.

“But (Patricia MacLachlan’s) ‘Sarah, Plain and Tall’ is damn good. ‘The Pigman’ could be read by anybody. And Judy Blume. . . . They’re wonderful, wonderful writers. Period.”

Even more disturbing to YA proponents are censorship efforts on the local level.

“That’s a very serious issue for us right now,” says publisher Horowitz. “I’m willing to let an author explore any subject as long as it’s not to exploit or titillate.” The genre’s critics include such bulwarks of the right as Phyllis Schlafly, who encourages parents “to stand up for their rights” and have their schools ban YA novels.

“They are so badly written,” Schlafly says. “I don’t think children are helped by reading about depressing, unattractive, disagreeable people. There’s nothing educational or inspirational or uplifting, and it’s no wonder children are depressed. Anybody would be who reads that kind of thing.

“Of course I’ve never read any of these books. I consider myself well educated and don’t consider them important enough to waste my time reading them.”

Peck had to cross police barriers to speak at a Decatur, Ill., school he attended as a child after Schlafly’s supporters targeted his book “The Ghost Belonged to Me.” The novel--about a relationship that straddles generations, as an adolescent listens to his uncle’s ghost stories--was criticized for supposedly encouraging participation in the occult.

“When you’re a writer for young people, you realize how terrified parents are and some act inappropriately,” Peck says. “They realize their kids are out of control and some look for scapegoats and find them in books. It’s easier to attack fellow adults. It’s easier to threaten a librarian than it is to challenge their own child’s authority.”

Buboltz, who objects to book banning, says Southgate Middle School’s official procedure for entertaining complaints deters most aspiring censors.

“I hand them a two-page form to fill out,” he says. “The first question is, did they read the book? Usually they take the form with them and go because they haven’t read the book. They seldom return.”

One parent who did return tried to get a Time-Life book on extra-sensory perception banned because, she said, it promoted devil worship. The school denied the request.

“But what that mother did was she created so much interest in that Time-Life book that it wasn’t two months before the book was totally worn out,” Buboltz says.

There have more subtle attempts as well. Buboltz noticed that one book that kept disappearing off the shelves was “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a YA progenitor that’s on the ALA’s list of 15 most-censored teen books.

“I had three copies when I first came to this library 11 years ago,” Buboltz says. “I noticed the copies were gone. I got a couple more and put them on the shelf, and one of my library-practice students said a teacher had taken it. I went to the teacher files, and no teacher had checked it out.

“(The teachers) had taken it. The objection was the use of the word ‘nigger’. To make sure it wasn’t used by students, they solved it by self-censoring.”

Some authors fear that principle will be taken to its contemporary conclusion, that censors, hoping to shield kids from the unpleasantries of the real world, will sterilize the fictional one. Author Lynch wrote about his concerns when a mother complained about salty pubescent language in his novel “Shadow Boxer”:

“As the father of a linguistically nimble 3 1/2-year-old, I don’t like every single word either. . . . Even the offending parties themselves, the 11-, 12-, 13-year-old boys, don’t pop off in conversation with their parents or other respected elders. . . . Where they ‘take the gloves off’ is when they are alone, or with peers, or with rougher-edged adults. . . .

“My plea is authenticity. . . . My job is to look at the thing and tell it. I am sorry if parents are displeased to hear about what goes on out of their earshot. I know I am not looking forward to someday hearing my daughter speak in purple, only to follow it up with, ‘Well, you wrote it, Dad.’ But I feel I have an obligation beyond that.”

That obligation is to create a parallel world that is inviting, not because it is utopian, not because it is protected, but because it is truly wrought. And Peck says it has never been more pressing to help children choose reading, especially YA fiction.

“These are novels that will give them some guidelines in survival, because we’re losing too many young people now, to suicide, to murder, to drunk driving, to drugs,” he says. “These are books that encourage life, not death.”