Sometimes in Error by Dean Gloster

 

            If my birth family had a motto, it would be “Sometimes in error, but never in doubt.” All three of us boys were scary smart. We were maybe even more sure of ourselves than we were smart. We each had the ability to reach conclusions based on small data sets.

 
I'm on the left. I eventually grew into my ears. 

That is, we were quick and clever but sometimes spectacularly wrong. Worse, some of us had a touch of what later in life I came to call “Brightman’s syndrome”—we’d had enough experience of being right even when a bunch of people disagreed, so that even if everyone else in the room argued with us, we still might assume we were right.

That’s a terrible trait if it leads to things like mansplaining to a someone who’s a domain expert in the subject matter under discussion.

                           Did you hear about the mansplainer who fell in a hole of his own making?                        It was a well, actually. 

But it’s a nice background for writing YA. Because, especially when we’re teens, some of us are very certain, even if we’re not always right.

One of the joys about writing fiction rooted in adolescence is the ability to use a naïve narrator. That’s not the same as an unreliable narrator, who sometimes lies to readers: It’s a narrator who is certain of her truth and tells it, but is sometimes wrong, because she doesn’t have a complete understanding of the world.

 

"I've thought a lot about what happens when we die, and I'm pretty sure it's not reincarnation. No loving and merciful God would put us through high school twice."--Kat, 16-year-old narrator of Dessert First

YA is often rooted in a fierce, individual point of view, and there are wonderful moments of dramatic irony with a naïve narrator, where the readers see and understand things the main character doesn’t. Yet. But not everyone gets it.

A decade ago, in a bitter troll belch of an online rant, then-contributing staff writer Ruth Graham wrote in Slate magazine that adults should be “embarrassed” to read young adult fiction, because it doesn’t reflect “the mature insights” of grownups. (Graham has now gone on to write for The New York Times, where apparently no one on staff is punished for being ignorant, shallow, and spectacularly wrong, as long as they’re sufficiently right wing. See, e.g., Ross Douthat and Bret “Bedbug” Stephens.)

Ms. Graham proudly made clear that she hadn’t (horrors) really read YA novels since “the early 1990s,” and in her exquisite, dry-eyed, adult sensibility, she reduced all of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars to just the following: a guy manipulates a girl so he can “deflower” her in Europe.

 

The Fault in Our Stars. About 6 million readers on Goodreads have gotten much more out of this book than that.

Her own obtuseness didn’t prevent Ms. Graham, however, from shaming everyone else who got more out of that novel—or who got anything from any other YA book they’ve read since their eighteenth birthday.

Some might say hers is the quintessential 21st century American commentary—ignorance of facts is asserted as a virtue; sweeping statements result; and H.L. Menken’s comments about Puritanism, “The haunting view that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” is followed by the action item, “so we’d better put a stop to that.”

Even as a guy with occasional Brightman’s syndrome, though, I would never dismiss, in a national article, an entire category of literature I wasn’t fractionally well-read in.

Along with being massively ignorant, Graham is almost completely wrong. Her assumption about books she hasn’t read—that they must have “immature” perspective because their protagonists are teens—is not only an insult to teens, it ignores how novels work.

Novels communicate through the perspective of their narrator, but even more through the action of the story, which often changes that narrator. And other points of view are conveyed by other characters (including adults.) In A.S. King’s breakthrough YA novel Please Ignore Vera Dietz, protagonist Vera is wrong about some things, but our view of her reality is rounded out by the other chapters narrated by her dead friend Charlie, by her father with his flow charts, and even by a pagoda-shaped building in town.

Please Ignore Vera Dietz. It's one of my favorite books. 

Even when the whole novel comes through the point of view of the protagonist, authors sometimes vary narrative distance giving us hints of the author’s view and give us the comments of other characters in scene that round out our understanding as readers.

Which is different and broader than the view of the protagonist.

Finally—let’s be clear—recent history has shown that maturity isn’t always a function of aging beyond 18. In the U.S. our 80-year-old alleged President has been hosting cage fights, losing a war with algae and reality, and, as Charles Rammelkamp put it in the Baltimore Sun, “making up puerile nicknames worthy of a middle schooler on a playground.”

If you blend bozo bronzer with American flag blue, does it make algae green?

In fact, like Ruth Graham, you can be a full adult and national correspondent for the New York Times covering religion, faith, and values, but be so cramped of soul that when you look at a book like The Fault in Our Stars you miss that it’s about facing mortality, about living in a world that is unpredictable, about the power of literature, about love, about loss, and about finding meaning in a short life, and instead tell millions they should ignore it—because you’re a naïve and unreliable narrator.

Through the power vested in me by virtue of my literary license, I hereby decree that—even if you’re an adult—you can read and enjoy YA books.

Trust me on that. I’m reliable.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. He has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now deals with opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) Starting in August, he will be co-editing the next anthology from Autonomous Press on the subject "Bounce", which you can read about at www.autpress.com. He makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social