YA As Retroactive Programming
A couple weekends ago, I was up til 5am reading The Hunger Games. According to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online reservation system, a LOT of people want to read it.
Normally I’m not into YA fiction at all. I prefer spending time within an adult consciousness – the logic, motives, and responses of seasoned minds, and the situations they get themselves into. Not so much parental struggles and high school. If I’m going back into a romanticized version of teenagerhood, give me The Lost Boys, not Twilight. (I *do* dig S.E. Hinton immensely. But of course I would, she wrote about greasers.)
I don’t understand the current fascination with YA, by so many adults. Is it escapism? Getting to go back to a more innocent time? Stray says a lot of people are into Harry Potter to recover their sense of wonder. I can understand the allure of wanting to return to one’s formative years – the vastness of not knowing your future yet, when anything really is possible. But a lot of this stuff, I wouldn’t have read when I was at the target age, either. At fourteen, I was already deep into Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and his revolting bizarro creatures of insatiable perversity. Vampire-werewolf love triangles? No, thank you.
What ended up persuading me into this book: the arena scenario that yanked me over the “blech, YA” barrier. I love love love survival horror and very jazzed to see someone else take a run at the last-player-standing setup (I’ve seen some kvetching about how it’s a ripoff of Battle Royale and I don’t think so – the idea is too big, and too good, for only one author to play with.) I’m into dystopian fiction probably because it’s so solution-oriented – the world is horrifying, how are you going to respond? And I liked the way that Katniss Everdeen went about solving it. A lot.
Donald Michael Kraig has an exercise in Appendix 1 of his book on ceremonial practice, Modern Magick, to increase magickal abilities and talents by making you more receptive to information. It involves flipping the pages of a calendar back to visualizing a younger version of yourself and burning a sigil onto your forehead, before flipping the pages forward again.
As I was reading through the way Katniss was handling her path through the arena, I started seeing myself at her age, in similar trying circumstances, and kind of backfilling: this is how I would have handled this situation, that problem, if I’d had this information. It was a way of sending the info back to my past self to salve a bad memory with knowledge, to believe and trust that I would have made a good decision if only I’d known how. Visualization-wise, it appears as a teacup sitting at the edge of the memory. Whenever something causes the memory to get barfed back up into present consciousness again, there’s a hot little mug of tea somewhere in the picture, disrupting all regret and cringing with its warm, calm presence.
You could pretty much do this with any good book at all – or a line from a movie, or a song – but YA gets you at the age when you’re figuring out who you are. Strong stuff, when written well.
And a question for the bookfiends: would Stephen King’s “Rage” and “The Long Walk” be considered YA by today’s standards?
