YA Literature

I had been planning to put off posting again until I reached the midpoint of David Copperfield.  An arbitrary decision, I suppose, but I have been ruminating on some things I wanted to say about reading the kind of books that I tend to read (and I am still mulling those thoughts over and will do my best to express them articulately when I get to that midpoint, which should be in the next day or so); also, that is the point where I plan to pause and take a little break with Anne of Windy Poplars.

You might be asking yourself (if you were able to muddle through those convolutions) why I'm posting this now, and that would be a good question.  To catch you up to where I am in the book, David/Trotwood Copperfield has finished school and is learning to be a proctor (now if he would just explain to me what precisely that means).  He is living on his own and, though he spends most of his evenings alone and lonely, he has had a few notable guests - Steerforth and company, and Uriah Heep.*  I've been struck by how timeless David's experiences are at this time in his life.


A couple of examples:

• When Steerforth and his friends dine with David Copperfield, they all (David especially) get absolutely wasted and David makes an utter fool of himself.  (Also, his description of being drunk, in which he keeps saying that somebody did this ridiculous thing, then comes to realize that it was himself, is brilliant.)
• This: "I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee; which I seem, on looking back, to have taken by the gallon at about this period of my existence."

Seriously.  I read a lot of YA literature over the last year (and will be reading a lot more in the year to come) and if you updated the rhetoric of these passages ever so slightly, you could drop them into just about any book that deals with coming of age.  

Where am I going with all this?  I have to make a little digression to explain.  Earlier this year, a student asked me for a book that was similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (a request which thrilled me, because I adore that book).  I gave him The Catcher in the Rye.  A rather obvious choice, but for good reasons (first-person narrative, coming of age story, deals with depression and loneliness, and so on).  A few weeks later, the teacher who had introduced him to Perks (they read it out loud in class, which is AWESOME) mentioned to me that he wasn't really getting into Salinger and she thought it was probably too dated for kids to connect with these days.  I didn't argue, but I also really vehemently disagreed.  The more books I read about that time of life (lumped together lately as Young Adult literature), the more I realize how little has changed.  Yes, Holden Caulfield didn't have computers and cell phones (though really, Perks doesn't have all those super-contemporary trappings either), but he has the same problems.  And so, for that matter, does David Copperfield.  When we suggest that kids can't connect with characters created 50 years ago or 150 years ago, I think we're doing them a disservice.  When they're confined to the YA lit of the last 5 or 10 years (and don't get me wrong, I think a lot of that stuff is incredible), they miss out on all of the profound things said about young adulthood by the authors of previous generations.  And really, young adulthood never changes that much - David Copperfield's attempts to discover who he is and where he's headed are, yes, more wordy than Holden's or the narrator of Perks, but the differences are superficial.  The core is the same.  

*I understand David Copperfield's dislike of 'umble Uriah, though he hasn't really done anything particularly evil (yet, I suppose, since the back cover describes Uriah as the "most unforgettable villain in all literature").  I think this is primarily because he reminds me of Steerpike, from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books.  I'm hardly the first person to make this comparison - Peake's books are quite Dickensian (a conclusion I'm reaching in reverse, since I read them last summer and am really just now familiarizing myself with Dickens) and I wouldn't be shocked to learn that Steerpike's very appearance was based on Uriah's (the red eyes, the angular frame).  Anyway, I think that Steerpike is a particularly unforgettable villain (one of the most fascinatingly horrible characters I've ever encountered, really), and I can't recommend Gormenghast highly enough.  It was recommended to me largely because of the fabulous, verbose prose (Peake had such a command of English vocabulary and the sheer multitude and variety of words made my head spin), and I loved it for that and also for the weird, marvelous, and often creepy characters and the way Peake could make a slow, silent chase through vast tunnels and hallways in the early dawn utterly thrilling (I mean it - I don't know if I breathed while Titus and Flay followed Steerpike; if I did, I'm certain it was quiet and shallow, for fear that Steerpike would hear any noise that I made).