But don’t think that means my struggles with elements of the canon make me a cheerleader for contemporary, “relevant” YA works. That’s doubly true given that YA publishers have seemingly concluded that angst is an adequate substitute for character development and identity for plot.
This is on my mind because, a few weeks back, I finished reading one of these acclaimed YA books with my elementary-age boys. The 2007 novel The London Eye Mystery has starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, the School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. They praise it as a “well-constructed puzzle” with “fleshed-out characters” and a “unique narrator.”
That wasn’t my take. I found the 300-page volume to be mind-numbingly slow and weirdly tedious. The paper-thin mystery got bogged down in go-nowhere narration. And my reaction was charitable compared to that of my kids, who mocked it with increasing relish as it dragged on.
The story is about a boy’s search for his visiting cousin, who goes missing while riding the London Eye. The plot’s defining device is the narrator’s omnipresent autism. I suspect it’s his “unique operating system” that won the book all its plaudits. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder if empathy for the narrator short-circuited reviewers’ critical judgment. For our part, we found the narrator less than endearing, his ceaseless allusions to the weather wearying, and the payoff for his off-kilter brilliance laughably weak.
Okay, it wasn’t our taste. So what?
Well, The London Eye Mystery has been judged a “good” YA book by influential tastemakers who have articulated the reasons they like it. Cool. I disagree and can articulate my own reasons why. This is the crux of what it means to engage with literature (or cinema or theater or art). We wrestle with creative works and form judgments that we’re expected to defend.
But I’m struck at how little room there is for that when it comes to youth engaging with books, whether they’re YA or canon. I’m troubled that discussion of just what it is that makes a book good constitutes a remarkably small slice of our debates over literature and an even smaller slice of instructional time. Here’s what we have instead.
On the one side, the canonites insist that their preferred books are brilliant and foundational to the Western tradition, period. They’re to be admired, not subjected to critique. Yet they have little interest in unpacking the merits of these texts to explain why that is, or inviting students into a genuine back-and-forth about why these works are supposedly so profound or important or evocative or entertaining. Unsurprisingly, many students walk away unconvinced these towering works are all they’re cracked up to be.
Across the aisle, the anti-canonites rail against books penned by “dead white males” while celebrating the “diversity,” empathy, and contemporary relevance of their YA faves—also with little evident attention to literary merits or storytelling mechanics. The quality of the actual book takes a back seat to its sociopolitical statements, to its inclusivity and messaging. Students are expected to read these works to cultivate empathy and understanding. Pushback against their virtues is not encouraged but rather often deemed a troubling sign of bigotry or wrongthink.
In different ways, the two camps are less interested in why a given text is good and more in whether the reader is virtuous enough to appreciate it. If anything, the “wrong” sort of criticism is seen in these circles as a mark of unseriousness or narrow-mindedness. It’s reading as a moral litmus test rather than as a matter of intellectual engagement.
I’m not suggesting a book is only good if self-indulgent, screen-addled 15-year-olds like it. But I am saying that teachers should be engaging students in an ongoing dialogue about literary quality. It’s good and appropriate that teachers make the case for a given work, but the arguments should be discussed rather than presumed.
