In a YA State of Mind

While I was in the thick of my romance-reading marathon, I often thought the books I read would be designated YA¹ if it weren’t for the age of their protagonists (sometimes as old as early 30s) and the eventual/inevitable explicit sex. Just as often, I found myself thinking about how much YA is better than whatever I had in my hand at the time, with characters who are more compelling and plots that are more affecting. I had a specific writer in mind. Pre-romance splurge, I doggedly collected every book by Norma Klein, who published something like 50 of them before she died at that same age. They’re all out of print except Domestic Arrangements, which is not her best.²

When I was a kid, my public library had maybe half a dozen of Klein’s teen books. I discovered them around age 12 or 13 and was thrilled by how cosmopolitan and vaguely sleazy they felt. Her books are usually set in New York City, and are uncommonly nonchalant and descriptive (by YA standards) when it comes to sex. I doubted anyone’s life could be the way her characters’ lives were, yet prayed that mine would be. Her protagonists have multiple partners and relationships with big age gaps; they have treated and untreated mental illness; they get abortions and get married; their family members die; they have and become single parents. Her books were banned a lot and she wrote about that, too—she wrote so damn much. I love her description of one crusading parent as “a stunning blonde” who “has no profession.” I really wish she’d lived longer.

Klein wrote a lot of love stories but I wouldn’t classify them as romance because of the brisk, no-nonsense narration.³ She doesn’t dial up the tension and draw out courtships, which is part of what fascinated Young Me; in her books, people have sex abruptly, almost accidentally, after a series of encounters that are uncomfortable, awkward, and indeterminate. You know…like teenagers.

For as accurate as Klein’s depictions are, and for as clumsy and humiliating as it is to be a virgin (or, for that matter, alive at any age), I remember high school as an intensely romantic period, maybe the most romantic time of my life due to the relentless heightened emotions. This recollection doesn’t require rose-tinted revision; pain and suffering are integral to romance and I was in pretty much constant agony from years 12-17, unless I was in a sustained moment of unprecedented ecstasy.⁴ I was suffused with yearning and desire for things I couldn’t articulate or accurately imagine. I had hopes but not expectations. And that chaos of insecurity, uncertainty, longing, and anticipation is romance, or at least those are its building blocks in literature, and I have a vague memory of learning in college that literature invented the concept. If this allegation potentially heard in a classroom 20 years ago is true, it means there would be no romance without books. The emotions might be there, but the organizing form wouldn’t. I find that easy to believe.

YA, to me, is—or at least can be—the most romantic genre though Norma Klein flouts that.⁵ She respects her characters as sexual beings⁶ but she isn’t sentimental about them and her sex scenes aren’t intended to titillate, though pretty much everything pertaining to sex will have that effect on adolescents, a demographic who, pre-internet, made do with looking up words like “penis” and “breasts” in the dictionary if they couldn’t find a stash of dirty magazines.

Klein’s approach is a stark contrast to another YA author I liked as a kid, Ann Rinaldi, whose heroines are young teen girls who never consensually do anything more than kiss and get betrothed. When I (re)read her Time Enough For Drums this year, I found it more romantic than recent adult romances by rather a lot. I’m not sure if that’s because the story is especially well told or because I re-experienced the rapture it evoked when I was a kid, or both.

The premise is this (spoilers to follow): Jemima is a spirited, Rebel-sympathizing 15 year old in 1775 New Jersey who despises her strict, handsome, 24 year old Tory tutor John, who’s been teaching her since she was 13. He’s a hard ass who constantly admonishes her, and her parents, who are always on his side, adore him, so they back him up. She’ll say her version of “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” and “ATAB” and then be forced to tearfully apologize by her mother or father. Here’s a typical interaction:

Jem kind of has a boyfriend, a Quaker her own age, and John sees her kiss him before he (the Quaker) goes off to war. John then intercepts the Quaker’s letters to her and only hands them over if she behaves, threatening to burn them if she doesn’t do as he says. This is a genius development because it makes you as the reader really hate his guts, just like Jem does. Wouldn’t it be crazy if we were to go from thinking he’s a villainous jerk to realizing he’s a sexy hero?

John has to go away for a while, allegedly on business, and when he comes back, he’s tan and has a beard. He buys Jem some fancy ribbons, which she likes, but they immediately get into a fight and he takes away her horse.

A hot man in confusion and pain, with muscles involved? I’m sat.

Jem gets sick, John brings her a book of love poems, and she’s disoriented by him being so nice to her. When she gets better, she tries to return to her sassy little bitch ways but he disarms her by giving her a look of “troubled intensity” and by not being mean back. What a fine kettle of fish we have here. It’s hard to be a 24 year old in love with a 15 year old you’re in charge of, and no one ever said it wasn’t.

On her 16th birthday, Jem interrupts John while he’s working, and then snoops around when he leaves the room. She uncovers letters that prove he’s a Rebel spy, he walks back in, slams the door, grabs her wrist, and loses his shit.

It is a truly masterful enemies-to-lovers Uno reverse card moment. Notice that Jem is thinking about what clothes John isn’t wearing. And since it can be safely assumed that he’s wearing pants, and those pants cover his hips as most pants, dare I say all the pants of that time period, do, why would her attention be on “his breeches”? I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is horniness, plain and simple.

Time Enough For Drums was published in 1986, and none of Rinaldi’s subsequent books came close to being so good, in my opinion, though she was as prolific as Norma and there are many I haven’t read. It seems that by the 90s, she started minimizing romantic connection in her plots and skewing toward a younger readership, though there is still often a vibe of swooniness throughout, and sometimes intense, heart-racing energy passing from the heroine to her father figure. Is that just me being a weird pervert? We shouldn’t rule it out. But let me make my case.

In Wolf by the Ears, Rinaldi’s most acclaimed book, Harriet Hemings journals furiously about the man who is her (unacknowledged but widely recognized) father, a man who also owns her because she’s a slave and he’s Thomas Jefferson. Here are some representative samples:

Harriet goes through this every time she has a run-in with TJ: tears and dizziness and fixation and declarations of love.

I know it’s bad form to speculate on a writer’s motivations or feelings based on their creative work, but it seems to me Rinaldi had big gooey bootlicking crushes on many of the men she wrote about. I’m not trying to cancel a deceased woman whom most people have never heard of, nor am I trying to minimize or make excuses for her white crimes. Rinaldi repeatedly said she got into her historical fiction niche because her son, who grew up to become a cop, loved it. She was fully America pilled, which is not an acceptable way to be. And in the books I’ve read, she was remarkably consistent about her fetishization of authority figures⁷ and especially of the so-called founding fathers and other military and political people of note. They’re all Great Men crowned by auras of dignity and wisdom, and whenever the heroine lays eyes on one of them, she’s overcome with a reverence and respect that carries with it a sense of hushed submission. It’s sort of like passionate religious supplication in that way where what’s happening is ostensibly not sexual, yet from the outside it seems pretty indecent.

While YA may be the most inherently romantic genre, I think historical fiction is the most inherently horny, though I don’t yet know why. I’ll try to revisit that question at a later date, when I’m emotionally prepared to tackle As Meat Loves Salt.

Next week: a personal intermission about illness, drugs, and love, with nary a book in sight.

1  Not librarian-sanctioned, canonical, Newberry YA like Tuck Everlasting or The Giver, but more like Sweet Valley High: Two-Boy Weekend

2  The Klein YA books I think are truly excellent: It’s Ok If You Don’t Love Me, Beginner’s Love, Hiding. The second tier picks, which I still treasure: Older Men, Going Backwards, Love is One of the Choices, Family Secrets, My Life as a Body, Give and Take, That’s My Baby, Just Friends, Learning to Fall, Angel Face, No More Saturday Nights…. I’m realizing the second tier comprises all the rest of her YA. So just read any of them and you’ll be good.

3  That’s present in all her work, though I like her adult novels less than her YA. I haven’t really dug into why that is but I think her casual, direct style works better with teenagers, especially when she writes in first person. She’s more restrained and a little staid when she aims for an older audience, yet maintains her penchant for zany character quirks, and the combination annoys me.

4  The high of friendship and male attention during this era, for me, were more powerful than any narcotic.

5  I think Judy Blume does, too.

6  Also, Klein’s girl characters have orgasms with some regularity, which is/was pretty radical.

7  I’m actually kind of desperate for someone else to read In My Father’s House and tell me if I’m wrong that there is sustained sexual tension between the narrator and her stepfather. It really might be that, when I had my first encounter with it as a horny kid, I read that tension into the text (because I hoped an orgy would break out in every book I picked up) and now, decades later, I can’t read without that memory. But I think it’s legitimately albeit unintentionally there!