Has Childhood Gone awol?

It is a category that deals both in fantasy and in heavy doses of reality (everything from acne to aids). Young Adult can encompass chapter books (Roald Dahl’s work) and middle readers (Judy Blume’s books), and novels for older readers, with their darker themes. They are cheaper to produce than picture books, appeal to a larger audience, and are more profitable. With the extraordinary success of the Harry Potter books, everyone is following the money. Clive Barker has a fantasy series, Abarat, to which Disney has already bought the film, theme park, and multimedia rights. These books are intended to be read by both children and adults; the Potter books are available in an adult edition.

Part of the current success of YA may be due to the teenaging of the world. Six-year-olds are inching toward adolescence, and thirty-three-year-olds are retaining its traits (sullen, unformed, opinionated, useless, dangerous). Adolescence offers relative autonomy and no responsibility, an appealing combination. It is becoming the ugly meeting place for a large part of society. If J.D. Salinger were to write The Catcher in the Rye today, Holden Caulfield would be a plausible thirty-seven-year-old, ruminating on sex, love, and movies, prematurely grey (as the sixteen-year-old version was) and confused.

The Harry Potter series isn’t really fantasy, as one publisher pointed out, despite the sorcery and wizards. It is a clever reinterpretation of a genre that was once called British Boarding School fiction. A child, or a set of siblings, go to stay with wicked strangers, uncaring relatives, or cruel institutions, and find ways to cope. Lemony Snicket has explored the genre wonderfully in his multi-volume series on the unfortunate Baudelaire children.

The vast readership combined with the sheer size and relative complexity of the Potter books produced a collective relief that the New Child was still reading. He hadn’t been weaned away from books by images, by video games. What will she read next? There are a few hybrid forms out there, catering to a market that is by turns sophisticated and childish. Chuck Dugan is awol, by Eric Chase Anderson (brother of Wes Anderson, director and co-writer of The Royal Tenenbaums) is billed as “a novel with maps.” It is 224 pages and uses a typewriter-style font, so it gives the impression of amateurism, of a school paper. There are childish, idiosyncratic diagrams. Yet the hero is an adult. Chuck Dugan is an eighteen-year-old midshipman in the US Navy who has gone awol in order to follow a treasure map left by his late father, and to prevent his mother from marrying a weasel. A kind of postmodern Hardy Boys tale—treasure, adventure, muted romance—it reflects the childhood urge to both face our fears and leave them behind. We want to read our own story (having gay parents, dealing with school, being new to the city, unwanted, geeky), but we also want to escape our own stories and go to Oz, to Narnia, to Hogwarts, to Wonderland.

The death of the picture book would leave an unfortunate lacuna: the shared moment when parent and child explore some place magical. The McLuhanesque beauty of picture books is that the medium is the message. I read to my children and we come to inhabit that landscape together. While announcing the death of the picture book is premature, its decline has certain consequences. It is unlikely that the genre will produce another Seuss, for one. The era of having your picture book become a cultural phenomena, read by children, discussed by adults, may be over. As reality is becoming grimmer, as innocence evaporates, those places where Sneetches stroll and Flummoxes shuffle will become more and more valuable.