Books

Over at Amazon’s Omnivoracious, the indefatigable Jeff VanderMeer has kindly posted a recent interview he did with me about YA books I love–oldish, newer, and forthcoming.

As you may have noticed, I’m a bit MIA this week. We’re busy and also dealing with family illness and the like, so that may be the case for a few more days. Back with posts about recent fabulous reads soon, though. Have a good weekend, everybody. I leave you with a link to a truly stupendous fan art gallery (Snape! House! Spock! Elvis!), courtesy of RLB.

I’ve now read Kalpana’s Dream and One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, and want desperately to read everything she’s ever written. Sadly, our library seems to have only a short story collection. Woe.

Anyway, if you’re looking for strange, beautifully written books that wrap you up like an embrace, books full of joy and hope in the best way and not the sappy one… One Whole and Perfect makes me feel much the same way that Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle does.

Gawker had the goods yesterday on the relaunch of the Sweet Valley High series, complete with new covers featuring some soap star I’ve never heard of. I don’t hate the new covers. As much as I now feel a strange affection for the old ones (those pennants!) for purely nostalgic reasons, I remember hating that particular dorky drawing style of cover even as a kid.

And, yeah, I read all the SVH books I could get my hands on when I was a pre-teen, and I’m kind of sad that I don’t recall very much about them other than the bad girl/good girl, don’t-we-all-want-to-be-a-twin* thing. I read lots of pretty disposable tween/teen fiction, and about the only things that stick in my mind from that particular milieu are Christopher Pike books**. (I count Judy Blume and the Ramonas and stuff like that as things I read when I was younger, and not in the category of "pretty disposable tween/teen fiction" — The Baby-Sitters Club books would be another example and certainly of the series style stuff, though now that I’m thinking about this I remember adoring Betsy Haynes’ The Against Taffy Sinclair Club, which always seemed kind of an ode to meanness, and the later books in that spin-off series. Those books weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Anyway, before you judge, remember that I was also reading a lot of Shakespeare. It was a balanced fictional diet.)

Still, like Jenny Han over at the Longstockings, some of the text changes involved in the SVH repackaging trouble me. I could care less about the Fiat becoming a Jeep Wrangler, but as Han says:

So apparently a size 6 is no longer "perfect." The Wakefields are now a perfect size four, according to the press release. I’m surprised they didn’t go so far as saying, perfect size 2. Or zero for that matter! I mean, yes, clothing sizes are getting bigger (ie a 1950s size 8 is NOT a modern day size 8, it’s like a 4) as we are getting bigger, but it’s obvs not just that– today’s standard of beauty is basically anorexia. Just look at the runways! Look at Hollywood’s big stars! Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Sarah Michelle Gellar–all tiny.

Disgusting–why not obliterate references to the twins’ sizes at all, to *update* them? How far we’ve come, baby.

The often-hilarious SVH-focused Dairi Burger blog was created to "reread the entire series to relive my tween years, and also to get really angry at how SVH gave me a false and misguided view of high school life. And life in general. In fact, I blame all my insecurities, problems and worries on these books." She has even harsher words on the revamp, and wonders why the whole thing is necessary (or if it’s even possible):

Why? Trying to cash in? Will tweens of this generation appreciate it? I don’t think so. It’s so ridiculous and not like anything today. And think about how cellphone, internet and myspace would have affected the SVH kids. I don’t know if it would be better or worse. Plus, the Gossip Girl series is kind of the SVH of today.

Anyway, this is also a great excuse to link Lizzie Skurnick‘s awesome 2002 Baltimore City Paper piece "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Confessions of a Sweet Valley Scribe":

 First of all, for those of you who think this piece serves as some nice free advertising for a certain hack, think again. There are no royalties in the world of Sweet Valley. There is also no author credit. That invariably goes to the ghostly Laurie John (who, according to some girls on Amazon.com, my lone source of public critical analysis, is "losing her touch") and to the creator, Francine Pascal (please don’t sue me), who lives it up in Paris off the skin of all of our typing fingers but is also the author of the completely awesome ’80s Y.A. masterpiece Hangin’ Out With Ceci, so I don’t care.

Writing for Sweet Valley does not, as many of my highfalutin academic colleagues seem to think, involve simply dumbing down "normal" writing or being shallow (although that serves as a good illustration of how we actually think of teenage girls). Teenagers are notoriously tough customers, and they can sniff out a snob or a suck-up very quickly: When I started using brand names in Jessica and Elizabeth’s bathroom, I was immediately admonished for commercialism on Amazon, and the reader reviews for my most recent book sent me quivering off with my tale between my legs ("This book should never have been written.").

Successful teen writing is about sound, as in sounding right. Neve Campbell changed the rhythm, and Buffy changed it a little more, but it all still depends on evoking that palpable sense of Sweet Valley, of biology class and beach parties in a camp-free environment, one as recognizable as Raymond Chandler’s L.A. but sometimes as elusive (again, case in point, "This book was OK but not good").

Reality bites, as they say (while we’re revisiting dated chesnuts). (Thanks to Micol for the heads up on the Gawker post.)

*Submitted as evidence: Brandon and Brenda. And there are rumors Rob Thomas may bring back some of the original cast members in his revamp, which frightens me. I think Brian Austin Green on The Sarah Connor Chronicles may be as much of that as I can handle.

**I’ve been considering rereading some of these for grins. I have a stack plucked from my childhood bookshelves on the corner of my desk Right Now.

Updated to add: Micol also sends along a timely and really sharp article on repackaging and YA from Print Magazine (about visual culture and design), which contains a decent basic overview of the genre’s history (at least in marketing and design terms) and an interesting discussion of trends in book design for teens. A snippet:

The hero or heroine of a typical YA novel is trying to make sense of the world and his or her own place within it, but the physical book is a clearly defined object unto itself. Indeed, it’s an accessory, explains Marc Aronson, author of Race and a longtime YA writer and editor. "It has to sit comfortably next to all the other objects in the reader’s world, their magazines and clothes and music. It’s all about a sense of coolness and intelligence. It’s a style—it’s saying, ‘We are exactly who you are. This is the world you’ll feel comfortable with. Nothing about this book is going to make you feel awkward to carry it and wear it. It’s as sleek and cool and as with-it as you are.’" That might explain YA author and feminist Paula Danziger’s seemingly incongruous bias against picturing the main character of The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, a girl struggling with her weight, on the original cover.

In a discussion elsewhere, I was reminded of British artist and critic (or perhaps, more accurately, artist critic) Matthew Collings, whose BBC series and accompanying book This is Modern Art from the late ’90s helped me immensely in developing the ability to appreciate contemporary nonrepresentational art.

He did a 2003 follow-up series called Matt’s Old Masters, which I haven’t seen (though now that I’m reminded I’ll order the book version), but I remembered a fascinating little essay he wrote about the general thrust of it that ran in the New Statesman. Turns out the piece is still available online:

The key to Rubens is something that is before our eyes when we’re looking at his work, but which we’re not necessarily aware that we’re seeing. It’s not fat, sentimental nudity. We’re not interested in that any more. And if we are interested in royalty, it’s not because we believe the royals’ power comes from heaven, but because we suspect that they don’t deserve power at all and we want to see them cut down to size. Old mythological stories are of no interest to us, either, unless they’ve been recycled by Hollywood into science-fiction movies. Fatties, royals and mythology – they’re all dead to us. But there is something we do always want which Rubens supplies, and that’s pleasure. The form for it is painting itself, its capacity to be a language of pure feeling.

Imagine you’re in the Prado now, in front of Rubens’s The Three Graces: three life-size nude women. Now I’m going to tell you something about those outrageously big bottoms that I hope will simultaneously illuminate them and make them disappear. The pleasure isn’t in what you think is before you: an artificial, distant and slightly tedious scene. You recognise what the painting is of, but you don’t realise that it is also doing something mysterious. You believe in the illusion so much that you don’t see that it’s constructed out of melting paint. Focus on this. This is the bit that’s for you. It’s the bit that’s still alive, that’s connected to Rubens’s own nervous system. What he felt as he painted those brush strokes is the feeling that you’re now having: he wanted pleasure and so do you. And now you’re both getting it.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.