What's the name of this literary genre; and a few questions for parents of teen girls

Cafe Society
1

This is a long one, so if you’re not interested in literary studies, stop here.
(Hold on for the parents questions.)

I’m trying to find out if there is a name for this particular kind of novel as a genre.

I can give two examples of relatively overlooked books, and one that hit the best-seller list:

Overlooked:

  1. Speak (author slips my mind)
  2. Cuba 15 (not the video made in Cuba, but the novel by Nancy Osa)

Best seller:
3) White Oleander (by Janet Finch, with a movie and an appearance on Oprah’s book club)

"So, what," you ask me, "makes you think they constitue a genre?"

Good question. The reason is that they all are told in the voice of teenaged girls, in a very particular way, and yet they don’t resemble what has been traditionally called “teen fiction” (like Scholastic Press, or even Nancy Drew). And I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t call it “chick fiction.”

Some of the details that might make this a genre:
–The character of the narrative voice is always an outcast, and self-deprecating in self esteem
–As far as I can tell, the narrative character is always a teenaged girl
–The narrative voice tries to replicate current youth slang and idioms (but usually falls short somewhat)
–Unlike Scholastic Press and Nancy Drew, the novel attempts to portray a view of adolescent life that supposedly other adults are too old to be familar with–as if the adult author were saying to her adult reader: “See, this is what you don’t know about kids–I’m gonna show it to you, because I’m hip, and you’re not.”
–And finally, most importantly, the narrator is a teenaged girl who has a grasp of cultural subleties that is completely adult and unrealistic for a teen. It is clearly the cultural cognition of an adult, who probably has been to college. I’m not saying the girl is simply hip–all kids today have to be hip; they have no choice with the bombardment of media, and comsumeristic and peer pressure today. No, I’m saying the girl is unrealistically sophisticated–savvy in a way which is not explained in the novel. Being hip or cool if very different from being sophisticated.

Well, I take that back…Astrid in White Olleander had a mother that supposedly imbued this kind of cultural cognition in her, but considering how little time her mother (as the book portrays) spent with her in her learning days, and that she was kept from school, it seems very unrealistic.

In Cuba 15, the girl completely understands the aesthetics of kitsch, in intellectual terms. Yet, nobody else–adults included–with the weak exception of her mother, understands kitsch, or more specifically, why their taste in clothes is either bad or good. There is no explanation for this; they don’t teach the aesthetics of kitsch in middle school, as far as I know, anywhere in the U.S. (But if they do, tell me where…I’d like to work there.)

Of course, these books are written by adults, feigning a teenaged voice. Who are they writing to, and what exactly are the trying to tell their audience? If the audience is adults, do they really think they are the ones to tell us what teens are thinking? If the audience is teens, are they trying to encourage them toward deeper intellectual understanding of culture? I’m honestly confused!

I know one thing: I teach teens, and not a single one of them is ready intellectually to understand the aesthetics of kitsch. Maybe I just work at a really bad school…sigh…

I propose a theory: these books are aimed completely at adults, but under the guise that they are “teen fiction.” The adults who read them are not bored because the cultural outview in the narrator’s voice is actually adult; at the same time, they get vicarious pleasure in knowing that “I’m the only one who understands this poor teen girl.” If so, that’s a pretty neat trick, in literary terms! Well, only a theory–if teens like this kind of thing, it’s certainly better than reading than Cosmopolitan.

Anyway, finally…

To the Parents of Teen Girls:

–If you’ve read any book which fits this description, would you say that your daughter(s) actually do have this kind of cultural cognition? Where did she/they acquire it?
–If you haven’t read any of these books, what is your best guess regarding the above, considering my description?
–If you asked your daughter(s) outright (without any explanation) “Would decorate your room with kitsch?”, what do you think she/they would say?
–Substitute “kitsh” in the above with “Americana” (the term used in Cuba 15, how would they answer?

And for anybody else:

–If you’ve read a book like this, is it a genre, and if so, what is it called?
–If this genre doesn’t have a name, what name should we give it?

Thank you for indulging me.

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Sounds like a coming of age story, albiet with a young woman’s POV.Cite.

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Thanks Askia, I’m not making my point very well.

Okay, that’s not a bad call, but too general; it doesn’t specifically include my point about the cultural cognition. House on Mango Street for example, (I have an autographed copy of the very first edition, BTW) does not have that. I guess my OP is not too clear.

I’m talking about a VERY SPECIFIC COMING OF AGE STORy WHERE FIFTEEN-YEAR OLDS TALK LIKE GRADUATE STUDENTS IN THE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT UC BERKELY.

Is that Sandra Cisneros?

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and there is another one, about an Indian girl (India Indian) on Long Island–cannot recall the title at present–something like Born Confused. She has waaaay too much insight into her motives for behavior etc than any other sophomore I’ve ever met. My daughter read it, as did I, and I told her that the main character seemed to be(except in terms of romantic relationships) more like a COLLEGE sophomore.

I am not sure what to call this “genre”-maybe nostalgic/retrospective coming of age chick lit?

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Thank you eleanor, that’s exactly what I was trying to get at. You’ve hit the nail on the head! More importatn than the nostagia and retrospective for me is that they have a very unrealistic mindset, as you say. How can we express that?

Well, sigh, maybe I should…

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I’m sorry Askia, I didn’t mean to say that that site you gave wasn’t a legitimit genre, on the contrary. It’s a very clear genre as it stands. I only meant to say that I was wondering if there is a more specific genre for what I described.

That site you posted was quite informative, thank you, Askia.

7

It’s the Dawson’s Creek Syndrome. Take the fantastically witty dialogue and mature(ish) insight of thirtysomething writers, put it in the mouths of fantastically beautiful and self-assured twentysomething actors, and pass it off as a realistic portrayal of teenaged angst.

It started with My-So-Called-Life, was perpetuated by Buffy (which I think did it best) and peaked with Dawson. Now it’s infected literature as well.

I don’t think there’s a real name for is, so we always refer to it as Dawson’s Creep, because it’s vaguely creepy how self-aware these “teenagers” are.

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Speak is by Laurie Halse Anderson.

It does seem as though these books fit into some sort of coming-of-age category. I’ve read both Speak and Born Confused and liked them a lot. Of course, I’m in my 40’s, and was reading them in the context of a YA Lit class for school.

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A lot of my junior-high students like Speak.

Sure, the narrators of books like these don’t sound much like real teenagers. But I don’t think that makes the books fake, or not meant to be read by teenagers. The author is just trying for a specific literary effect.

Most of the characters in novels meant for adults talk much more articulately than the adults I know, too. That doesn’t mean that I can’t read and enjoy them, or that they’re meant to be read only by people who do talk like the characters.

They’re written that way because the author thinks I’ll enjoy reading that style of dialogue.

10

Okay, parent of a non-standard 14-year-old girl here. Many, many times, my daughter does seem much too mature for 14. Case in point: just a couple of weeks ago, she was saying how annoying it is when products try to seem hip by substituting a ‘z’ for an ‘s’ on the end of a word (we had just heard a commercial for Bratz dolls), and her commentary on the subject went very much like this: “I know the commercials are trying to be all hip and stuff, but it really doesn’t ever work, because there’s such diversity in teenagers all over America that there never really is one hip thing; and besides, even if something is hip for, like, a week, by the time the advertisers catch on, it’s sure not hip anymore”. And I looked at her and said “What planet are you from?” In another instance, the cute guy next door told her he liked her and wanted her to be his girlfriend. She told him she’d have to think about it. The next day she came to me and said “I’ve decided I’m going to turn him down; we barely have enough in common to just be friends, let alone more than that”. So I asked how she had reached this conclusion. She looked at me like I had two heads and said “By thinking about it. Don’t you ever reach conclusions by thinking about things?”

Now, she’s not always like this, and when she is, I consider it quite unusual for a girl her age. But sometimes she’s amazingly insightful and sophisticated.

11

Love it! I also like how you can get a double meaning on creep – as you said, it’s vaguely creepy, and it also seems to be sneaking up on me in unexpected places.

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Color me surprised that White Oleander is a teen novel. (It’s by Janet Fitch, not Finch, btw.) I thought it was an adult novel with a teen narrator, which isn’t uncommon, seeing that there are precious few teen authors as it is. It also seems common for teens in any adult novel to be preternaturally self-aware. The youngest sister in In the Time of the Butterflies is like this. She’s twelve at the beginning of the book, but talks like a rather self-possessed twenty-two year old, longing for marriage and making sharp comments about family relationships. It’s hard to find any novel where the characters aren’t more self-aware than real people – most people don’t engage in tense self-examination over every aspect of their lives. Do you find portent in mundane activities? The majority of novels written today are almost entirely about introspection, unless they’re fluff. The external events that besiege characters in novels are minor compared to the internal, especially in novels geared towards women, both young old. Whether or not this makes all novels a form of bildungsroman I’ve no idea. White Oleander is though, I think.

Drawing from personal experience, my mother said something to me once that’s stuck with me. (I’ll be 21 in August, btw, so it’s not like I’ve been an “adult” for long.) I was about fifteen and we were in the barn playing with some kittens. I asked her, with a kitten crawling across my face and another chewing on my ear, “Mom, how old do you think I am?” She replied, “There are times when I wonder if I gave birth to a middle-aged woman, and then sometimes, like now, when I think you’re still a little girl.” Talking to my friends’ younger siblings, I find that all teenagers have moments of intense maturity when they suddenly say something that makes you think they’re channeling Virginia Woolf or someone.

There’s this great passage from Possession AS Byatt that I think applies here, somehow, though I’m shaky on the connection right now. It’s on pages 60-61 in the paperback version. Maud has just shared a poem with Roland that she read as a young girl. It’s about the Sibyl being trapped in a jar and is interpreted as being about women’s role in Victorian society. Anyway, here’s the exchange:

I have a little bit more to say about the connection between this passage and trends in literature geared towards teen girls, but my computer time is up. If I can, I’ll come back later and explain myself.

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I agree with that Miss Purl, at least for traditional novels, in that the term “novel” originally was meant to describe a lenghthy overreaching arch of an individual’s emotional/psychological development and change.

I considered bildungsroman too, but that term always seemed to me to refer to an observation that takes place from an “objective” POV, in the third person. (I may be wrong in that.) I think of something like Educacion Sentimentale, by Flaubert. In anycase, it doesn’t seem like emotional change is the main empasis of this teen-girl-who’s-culturally-precious novels. They’re more concerned with vindication, it seems to me.

What, you don’t have a spare computer in the barn.? I do.

14

I just read my previous post. Please excuse my typing. I was in a hurry.

That’s cool. I did not know that.

Good point. The defintion of bildungsroman can be twisted and stretched enough to fit almost any novel involving a child/teen as a central character. Could it be said that the genre we’re trying to define focuses more on the emotional/spiritual growth of the reader? Do they fall into the category of instructional novel?

I’m beginning to think, considering the retrospective quality of these, that it would be fun to compare them to something like Jane Eyre, which is written long after the events happened. Young Jane has a similar precociousness. It’s also written in the first person. I think some connections might be able to drawn between it and White Oleander, especially in regard to the main characters’ interactions with authority figures.

Heh. My dad had some excuse. Something about cows not having fingers, and if they did, did we want them finding out about Animal Farm and rising against us? Commie cows we need not. Also, no office attached to the barn.

15

Hmmm…
After looking over Askia’s list again more closely I’m starting to think after all that I’m just grasping at straws looking for a separate genre from coming of age. Maybe these particular books which I’ve read are just coming of age novels with a particular style in common, namely the “Dawson’s Creep” phenomenon that WhyNot outlines. I don’t have a copy of Catcher in the Rye, and it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I wonder how it would compare.

FisherQueen: Good point that novelist have to make their protagonists interesting, though I hope the adults you know aren’t less articulate than the characters in Hemingway or Steinbeck (e.g., Of Mice and Men) :slight_smile: . BTW, I never meant to say I didn’t like these books (White Oleander and Speak are excellent; Cuba 15 is so-so). It was just an observation that this was becoming very common. I thought that since we now suddenly have “chick lit,” what would we call this lit? Junior-precocious-chick-angst lit?

Anyway,

That’s an interesting observation, Miss Purl, that didn’t occured to me. On the other hand, I think that’s exactly what made me create this thread–that is, the time perspective from which the narrative voice speaks with relation to the events of the story. Astrid is recounting her foster care experiences as relatively recent events in her life. She’s still a teenager when she tells us her story. Jane Eyre is recounting her story with more distance, as I recall (it’s been a while since I’ve read it). The passage which caused me to post is this (describing the kitchen of her family’s home, the narrator says):

(Bolding mine.)
This novel is mostly told in the past tense, but here we have some present tense descriptions which imply that the narrator still lives in this house, and she’s still observing her mother’s attraction to “Americana” (i.e., kitsch). This isn’t the “historical present,” but an implication that the story is being told shortly after the events of the story, more or less comtemporaneously. Many of the literary works in the list Askia sited are autobiographical coming-of-age stories, which have as a given that the person recounting her youth obviously has matured and therefore should obviously have a mature outlook when describing youthful experiences. Although fiction, Jane Eyre is similar, because there is no sense that this is an immediate account of something that just happened. It’s a story told from some distance.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, if, as a fictional character who is eighteen or so, you tell a story about the things that happened to you in your middle school and/or high school days, how can you recount these events from a perspective in which you know that you have “come of age” and therefore can describe these events with a drastically more sophisticated cultural awareness? To me, “coming-of-age” means you now have the right to vote; not that you’ve suddenly beome Joan Didion. I know it’s just a literary device; maybe it’s just me, but I think this is indeed “Dawson’s Creep,” though a term which includes literature would be nicer. More bluntly, I was thinking: “When something gets popular, we gotta have a name for it.”

Also: Miss Purl, I assume when you say the emotional/spiritual growth could be focused on the reader that you mean these are what people call “cautionary tales”? That never occured to me. (There’s a male coming-of-age autobiography called Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez, which I know is definitely a “cautionary tale.” The moral: “Don’t join a gang.”) But I might be misreading you, Miss Purl. Could you elaborate?

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The problem is that I’m not sure that the category of books that you are referring to are popular enough (or well enough defined in a way that makes them distinct from the other books in the coming of age category) to have a name yet.

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Sloppy word choice. When I read “popular” in the sentance I quoted, I assume it means “well-known”. When I used “popular” in my post I meant something more akin to “numerous”.

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I’d say your daughter’s on the right track, norinew.

With all due respect (WADR), I would have looked at you the same way. She explained it quite cogently. She apparently knew enough about this guy’s tastes and interest to say no. It probably seemed to her that you hadn’t listened to what she’d just said.
OTOH, I would question any boy who just walks up to a girl and says, “I want you to be my girlfriend.” Someone has to explain to him that things don’t usually happen that way.

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Well, either way,** Eureka**, that’s the issue I was opening with in post #15, and you’re right. I got the impression that it was popular. Maybe it really isn’t. I quess I need to read more “coming-of-age” books (they’ve never been my favorites). But I would assume that “well-known” implies “numerous,” though I’ve seen some research that indicates that, while many people are buying books these days, not as many are actually reading them. That’s a whole other issue, though.

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Are there enough of them to be a trend? I am trying like mad to think of other books that resemble them, but am coming up with books that don’t!

Meg in A Wrimkle in Time is hardly introspective–but again, that is for a younger (slightly) age group, no?

What of Up a Road Slowly ? (can’t recall author)–or the Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret or Summer of the Swans type books? They dealt with growth and maturity and painful choices, but lacked that subtle distancing edge–is this post-modern ironic teen fiction we are discussing?

I am not all that up on teen fiction (I don’t see the need for differentation–I am an avid reader of Harry Potter and other “juvenile”/YA fiction).

thoughts?

I like the Dawson’s Creep catch phrase, but I also feel it needs a lit reference.