Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life.… Read the rest