Packaging the Facts of Life

By J.D. Reed

Teen lit: sex, drugs and divorce on the shopping-mall rack

"I have clothes to wear, my own room, a TV and a pushbutton phone," says Marcy Lewis, 13, heroine of The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger. "Sometimes I feel guilty being so miserable, but middle-class kids have problems too." Indeed they do, and from Back Bay Boston to Bel Air, Calif., Marcy 's dilemmas and the perils of her fictional peers are avidly shared by a growing legion of juvenile readers. Once limited to such fare as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, teen fiction has blossomed into a lucrative new genre: suburban social realism.

With slangy precision, "Young Adult" novels (Y.A. to the trade) vividly portray addictions, sexual awakenings and even the nightmares of rape and incest, all within skateboard distance of the community swimming pool. Says prize-winning Author Robert Cormier (The Chocolate War; I Am the Cheese): "Kids aren't just sitting there watching TV and playing video games." In fact, teen-agers appear to be buying their own books for a change. Retail giants like B. Dalton have expanded Young Adult racks in their shopping-mall stores. Books such as Rock 'n ' Roll Nights, The Divorce Express and Are You in the House Alone?, wrapped up in catchy cover art, are moving faster than Pac-Man manuals.

One major publisher reports a 400% jump in its teen paperback titles since 1980. Throughout the industry, sales have tripled, bringing a touch of cheer to the financially ailing book trade. Y.A. are even available in lightly spiced series, such as Wildfire (Scholastic) and Sweet Dreams (Bantam), that feature adolescent romances like Saturday Night Date and I've Got a Crush on You. Many heroines in these confections never get to the first kiss. For boys there are thrillers like Your Code Name Is Jonah in Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure series. These are not traditional adventure narratives. Like Dungeons and Dragons, they allow teen and preteen readers to select their own plots. In The Abominable Snowman, for instance, the reader is a Mount Everest climber searching for the yeti with a friend named Carlos. The friend, however, is missing. "If you decide to search for Carlos, turn to page 5," instructs the book. "If you decide that Carlos is o.k., and go ahead, turn to page 6." Within the 14 titles, there are more than 500 different endings.

George Nicholson, Dell's editor in chief of books for young readers, insists that despite the explicit, eye-catching themes in many of today's Y.A. titles, "we also have considerable respect for this audience. We want to have an uplifting, affirmative quality to books written for children." Adolescents cannot seem to get enough. To keep up with the demand, Dell is offering a $1,000 prize (plus $4,000 in advances) for the most outstanding first Y.A. novel.

One Dell author who no longer qualifies for the award is Judy Blume, 44, godmother of upscale adolescent realism. Nineteen million of Blume's 14 teen tales are currently in paperback. She tackles social and sexual mores with sprightly straight talk. In one of her books, a group of twelve-year-old girls stare at the centerfold in a copy of Playboy, marveling at the model's breasts. Exclaims one flat-chested admirer: "Look at the size of her! They're huge!"

In Blume's Deenie, the 13-year-old narrator faces disease and ignorance in Elizabeth, NJ. Suffering from scoliosis, Deenie must wear an ugly, uncomfortable back brace. The experience helps her overcome the primitive adolescent fear of being different. But Deenie represents up-to-date psychology as well. Could her curvature of the spine have been caused by occasional masturbation? Set straight by a briskly efficient gym teacher named Mrs. Rappoport, Deenie muses: "I never knew there was a name for what I do. I just thought it was my own special good feeling. Now I wonder if all my friends do it too?"

Blume explores both the spirit and the senses. In Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, the twelve-year-old protagonist must choose her religion. Margaret's father is Jewish, her mother Episcopalian. The girl also fears that she will be the last of her clique to menstruate. Prays Margaret: "I'm going to be the only one who doesn't get it. I know it, God. Just like I'm the only one without a religion. Please. . . let me be like everyone else."

The petite, attractive Blume, daughter of a New Jersey dentist, wrote her first children's book 13 years ago, when her two children were young. They are now in college, and the divorced author divides her time between a New York City apartment and a suburban home in Santa Fe, N. Mex. These days she keeps her highly praised ear for dialogue in tune through the 2,000 letters that she receives each month from youthful admirers. Asked one twelve-year-old: "Do you write your books from your mind, or do you use a kit?" Blume hardly needs a blueprint. Says she: "I don't have a teen-age audience in mind when I write. I try to get inside the mind and skin of a kid, and let the book find its own audience." One nine-year-old requested, "Please send me the facts of life in number order." Blume replied, "Ask your parents." She hates to see her explicit novel of first love, Forever, on the shelves next to books for younger children. The bittersweet romance, however, is the volume most requested by teens in the New York Public Library.

Sexual angst is not the only way to the heart of the market. Orphaned Ponyboy Curtis, 14, and his greaser pals, for instance, are too busy fighting to date girls. In S.E. Hinton's bestselling The Outsiders, Ponyboy and his hoods battle Socs (Socials), who cruise their mean streets in Mustangs and madras shirts looking for loners. The results: manslaughter, murder, despair. But out of the rubble of class structure, sensitivity rises triumphant. Says Ponyboy: "What kind of a world is it where all I have to be proud of is a reputation for being a hood, and greasy hair? I don't want to be a hood, but even if I don't steal things and mug people and get boozed up, I'm marked lousy. Why should I be proud of it? Why should I even pretend to be proud of it?"

Susan Eloise Hinton, 34, wrote the novel when she was a 16-year-old Tulsa schoolgirl. "I was reading horse books then," says Hinton, who started using her initials so boys would also read her works. To date, her four gritty novels have sold 7 million copies, and all are in some stage of development for films. Francis Ford Coppola has finished shooting The Outsiders, and is currently making Rumble Fish. That Was Then, This Is Now has been optioned; Tex, starring Teen Idol Matt Dillon, has been released by Walt Disney Productions. The married Hinton, who owns a horse named Toyota, has no plans to write adult fiction. Says she: "I'd rather claim authorship of My Friend Flicka than Princess Daisy."

Secrets of the Shopping Mall, award-winning Author Richard Peck's ninth Y.A., satirizes teen class structure and cliquishness. Teresa and Barney, a pair of inner-city runaways, discover a society of boys and girls living secretly in a department store. This "Lord & Taylor of the Flies" is surrounded by specialty shops like Audio Jungle, the Tennis Connection and a place advertising CANDLES IN SHAPES YOU NEVER THOUGHT OF. There, the urban dropouts learn the value of independent thought, honest employment and all-natural fabrics. They also can identify suburbanites: "It looked like an oversized praying mantis, and it flowed like a surfer. As it swept nearer, Teresa saw it was somebody in cutoffs and knee warmers, a girl because she had an elastic top. She was riding a skateboard and wearing headphones clamped over both ears. She looked like . . . something intelligent but brutal from science fiction." Peck, 48, an American who attended Oxford, echoes his colleagues in teen realism when he says, "We rarely celebrate the captains of athletic teams; the most popular girl in school or the gang leader. We write for and about people who are gathering strength, solvers of problems."

Nevertheless, the form is fragile, and pressing it too hard can have bizarre results. Scott Bunn's forthcoming Just Hold On, for example, is serious but unfortunately reads like a literary version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Heroine Charlotte Maag, 16, is raped by her father, an Albany pediatrician. She befriends fellow Loner Stephen Herndon, who is hiding the shame and rejection of his own physician-father's alcoholism. By midstory Charlotte is on the sauce, Stephen is involved in a homosexual affair with a football star named Rolf, and both tumble into bed with another couple after a bourbon and pot party. At novel's end, Stephen is near catatonia, and Charlotte is institutionalized. One can hardly wait for Just Hold On II.

-- By J.D. Reed.

Reported by Maureen Dowd/ New York

With reporting by Maureen Dowd

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