Puff, the Magic Dragon : How the Newest Young-Adult Fiction Grapples With a World in Upheaval

With the spate of school shootings that culminated in Littleton, Colo., the panics over the raising of girls, then boys and the success of adolescent-oriented movies and TV shows, teenagers have erupted into the national consciousness. Whether as a crisis or as a golden revenue stream, they are suddenly all over the media. Moreover, just as we adults adjust to the digitalizing of our world, we sense that young people are almost a different species, bred to flourish in a multimedia environment. Looking out at these strange creatures--teenagers--adults seem unsure of whether to be scared of them or for them; whether to try harder to protect them from the world we have created or to trust that they will make better use of it than we have. Have we given them too much freedom and cyber access or not enough of our all-too-busy selves?

One of the best ways to understand the fragile yet vibrant world of teenagers is through coming-of-age fiction, for often authors sense and can give form to interior lives that are invisible to the rest of us. But until recently, few looked to young adult novels to encompass rapidly changing realities. All too often they were addicted to an insistently narcissistic first-person, present-tense voice, and were trapped within the conventions of a two-dimensional brand of “realism.” No longer. The best new YA novels are finding ways to bring the explosion of media narratives within the borders of bound books, giving young readers a space to recognize their imperiled and empowered selves. For teenagers, self text and voice have all gone multimedia wild. Here, in ever increasing increments of weirdness, are some recent novels that explore that world.

Bruce Brooks’ new novel, “Vanishing,” is about two characters in a hospital: Alice, a girl who is wasting away from a hunger strike and bronchitis, and Rex, a boy with an unnamed terminal disease. From the first we see how she is experiencing her state: “I hardly sleep at all. I--I just kind of shimmer beneath the sheets, see, and sort of glow through the night.” To which Rex responds, “You’re entirely too poetic--and too bad at it--to be really sick.”

Brooks offers elegant, lyrical phrases, then undermines them with a tough-talking practicality. You have to pay attention to words, how they hypnotize and what they actually mean, to see where he is going. Writing a book that is so attentive to language shows a level of trust in his young readers that is typical of Brooks but relatively uncommon among writers for young adults. Though Brooks’ young characters are seriously ill, they and the readers they stand for are not the most damaged figures in the book.

In one sense, Alice is vanishing, aiming to turn herself into light. But in another, it is the adults who have vanished from her--and whom she emulates in attempting to both transcend and obliterate herself. Her mother is an alcoholic, her father a weak man who kicked Alice out of the house to quiet his domineering mother. In Brooks’ universe, adults cannot see young people and have little to offer them but the acting out of their own weaknesses. In their harsh dramas of life and death, it is the young people who are the Hunger Artists in adults’ Kafkaesque world. Nevertheless, Brooks’ straightforward narrative is well within the boundaries of conventional fiction.

Moving a step from those secure shores, we come to the classicists of the new YA fiction, Robert Cormier and Paul Fleischman. Cormier’s latest book, “Frenchtown Summer,” might at first seem an odd entry in this lineup of experimental fiction. It is about a sensitive boy during a Depression-era summer in a French Canadian New England factory town. Told in a series of first-person prose poems, each of which adds up to a chapter, it is a kind of adolescent “Our Town” in which the boy’s dawning sexuality brings with it an increasing sensitivity to the secrets of the adults around him.

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As in “Vanishing,” it is the father who is shadowy here: “[M]y father was a silhouette / as if obscured / by a light shining behind him.” While the boy, Eugene, a Catholic, has a sense of sin for the secrets that do not make it to his confessional, the larger evils are outside of him. What is saving to him, and to the book as a whole, is a poetic sensibility. What could be a novella or a short story has been stripped down to evocative lines that could easily be read as a radio play. As Karen Hesse does in “Out of the Dust,” Cormier has risked reducing a tale to its essence, to poetry, and so has made a quite traditional story entirely fresh. Stripping a story to bare poetic lines lets in room for illustrations, and each chapter features Rockwell Kent-like images that add to the sense of clean-edged, if harsh, Americana.

Fleischman takes this process of distilling prose one step further in “Mind’s Eye.” Like “Vanishing,” the book is set in a ward where, in the main, only two characters carry the story. But here there is no narration at all. On one level, the novel proceeds entirely in dialogue and could be performed as a play. Fleischman has pushed the novel even further toward pure voice and away from the calm assurance of a narrator’s guiding hand. On another level, though, the book does not take place on the page at all.

In the progress of the novel, Elva, an 88-year-old woman who is losing her sight, begs a new inmate at a convalescent home, Courtney, a 16-year-old girl with a severed spinal cord, to read to her from a 1910 Baedeker. Elva wants them to take an imaginary journey to Italy together--along with her long-dead husband. As Elva and Courtney take their trip, readers fill in the details in their own minds--guided perhaps by the bits of Baedeker maps reproduced in the book.

Even as he turns readers over to their imaginations, Fleischman makes his most dramatic break from conventional young adult fiction. Measured against the world of electronic distractions and games of erotic entanglement she has grown up with, Courtney believes she has become a monster, a Medusa, “because I’m as ugly as she is.” Invention is as dangerous as it is liberating. In this young adult world, the threats are no longer out there, they are in here: “I have it inside me. I have the Evil Eye.”

Which brings us to two baroque books. Walter Dean Myers’ latest is “Monster.” As does Fleischman’s, this book abandons a reassuring external narrator and gives us instead a kind of script. But where “Mind’s Eye” looks back from the novel to poetry and theater, “Monster” moves ahead to film and television. The whole novel is a mental film Stephen Harmon is writing as he waits out a trial for murder.

According to the prosecution, Stephen Harmon was meant to case out a Harlem corner store, give the all-clear and then get part of the profits when a couple of older, tougher kids pulled off an easy theft. The robbery was bungled and, in the fracas, the store owner was killed with his own pistol. A couple of jailhouse tips led the police to the two main suspects and then on to Harmon.

Harmon is a smart 16-year-old who goes to an elite New York public high school, and he particularly loves film. He sees a kind of truth in what a filmmaker records. So his mental film is a test: Is he the monster the prosecution describes him as being, the monster he sees in jail in the faces and fights all around him? Or is he the loved and lovable child his parents knew him to be?

As in “Mind’s Eye,” the evil is in Harmon or, if it is not, good and evil are just the many narratives, the many spins, that adults, the media, the courts impose on young people--and, in this case especially, on young black male. There is no self, really, outside of all of the spinning, just the film record of the debate. There are enough clues to suggest what Harmon actually did on the day of the robbery but not whether those actions add up to making him a monster. Both the adolescent reader and the adolescent protagonist must decide for themselves how to piece together life’s competing, and overwhelming, narratives.

There is a strange crisscross in these books: as the space for the individual, the emerging adolescent, the narrator’s voice diminishes to the vanishing point, the books open up. The spot art in “Frenchtown Summer,” the map fragments in “Mind’s Eye” become in “Monster” a book in which design is part of the story, and many kinds of art fill the pages. The author’s son, Christopher, a talented artist, made the images and is listed as one of the creators of the book. If young people are losing a sense of self to the onslaught of the media, they are also being freed to find themselves in words and images, in novels that are performances or scripts.

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This moment of simultaneous crushing and freedom leads us to “Making Up Megaboy” by Virginia Walter. As in “Monster,” Robbie Jones is in jail. Here there is no doubt: He killed a Korean liquor store owner, using his father’s gun to do it. But why? The entire book is a set of statements from the people in his life, matched with art that is evocative of them or is by him.

He and his only friend, Ruben, had drawn a comic strip, “Megaboy,” and some of their art flits through the pages as well. The psychological dynamics in this book are the least sophisticated of the group--he is clearly lonely and has a crush on a classmate, who comes across as a self-preoccupied airhead. Yet “Megaboy” is an extreme case of this new field of young adult fiction in which the media frees and yet obliterates young people. Here all narratives are equal; a child’s own working out of who he is holds no special place against everything everyone tells him he is. A secure world of concerned adults has vanished entirely, to be replaced by professionals with agendas: reporters and cops, lawyers and doctors. The strange effect of reading “Megaboy,” as with all of these books, is a kind of exhilaration, an almost at-the-circus excitement, at the ways in which books are opening up to allow in visuals, other media, other narratives, mixed with a sense of fear for where the self can be found amid all the sound and fury.

In the new YA novel, and the new YA reality, adults vanish and intrude, media crush and free. This makes for an exciting time in fiction. It will be up to young people as they read and react to these books to tell us what it is like to live in a world in upheaval.

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VANISHING by Bruce Brooks. Laura Gertinger Books/Harper Collins: 160 pp., $14.95

FRENCHTOWN SUMMER by Robert Cormier, Delacorte: 128 pp., $16.95

OUT OF THE DUST by Karen Hesse, Scholastic: 228 pp., $15.95

MIND’S EYE by Paul Fleischman, Henry Holt: 144 pp., $ 15.95

MONSTER by Walter Dean Myers; Illustrated by Christopher Myers, Harper Collins: 240 pp., $15.95

MAKING UP MEGABOY by Virginia Walter; Illustrated by Katrina Roeckelei, DK Publishing: 64 PP., $16.95