The Atlantic Report: Young Adult Fiction Doesn't Need to Be a 'Gateway' to the Classics

We're on the last week of my series on The Atlantic and I think I can make one summarizing statement:  It's boring.

Its politics and foreign policy coverage is all Monday morning quarterbacking, which is why I haven't done much with it. Everything else is meandering prog-center gibberish.

But, I soldier on. Our friend Noah Berlatsky dribbles, "Young Adult Fiction Doesn't Need to Be a 'Gateway' to the Classics." Why does he favor his ten-year-old reading the Percy Jackson series over "classics?" The answer, dear reader, may make you yawn:

As just one example, most of the classic children's literature books—Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Narnia, Treasure Island—look very dated today by virtue of their overwhelming whiteness, their time-bound, helpless inability to imagine that people come in more than one skin color.

What a buffoon. Does he not see that the books he listed are all about children entering a strange and fascinating new world? Young readers identify with the perspective of being astonished by their new environments, not because Wendy introduced the Lost Boys to mayonnaise and Wonder Bread. What does "whiteness" have to do with it?

I like to laugh at Berlatsky because he straight-facedly questioned why we don't identify with Skynet's goal of exterminating the human race in the Terminator series, but that argument makes sense, considering his perspective. He's not human--at least, he wishes he wasn't.

He'd rather float over the human world, understanding everything through the power of his amazing mind. No wonder Treasure Island and the others leave him cold--the protagonists are placed within worlds that are bigger than them, worlds that they have to discover and figure out.

Really, though, the article is about the old lament, "If people read junk, then they won't read good stuff!"

That ship has sailed. Anyway, if a kid reads enough, he or she will naturally become more sophisticated. Of course, that doesn't mean that the next stop is The Corrections or Gravity's Rainbow.

However, there is something troubling about modern children's media:

[Ruth] Graham tentatively suggests that the Percy Jackson books are too beholden to their own time, and timelessness or universality is, of course, often used as a measure of quality. But it's not a very convincing measure.

It's not Berlatsky's sneer at timelessness, as if something that resonates across generations is no big deal. The problem is that children's entertainment is such an industry that kids grow up in a bubble unconnected to anything but their present time and culture. Every stage of development, from toddler to teen, has brand-new media focused directly to them and reinforcing what they already know.

Even something as silly as old Tom and Jerry cartoons are snapshots of different eras and attitudes. Being exposed to them opens up the world to children the way Alice in Wonderland opens up their imagination. Portraying Greek gods as wisecracking moderns may be fun, but only in contrast to our understanding of their original incarnations. Berlatsky is fine with amputating the context.