Shades of MSCL: When instead of apologizing for betraying someone, you minimize their pain, and it’s supposed to be self-deprecating and romantic

From Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE:

“It’s never been alright. Not since the day I walked up these stairs and walked away from you. I ‘urt you that day, I know I did, but all you lost was me. I ‘urt myself a million times worse because I lost you.”

From MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s should’ve-been-penultimate episode (damn you, “Weekend”), “The Betrayal”:

Angela: Look, I don’t care anymore, okay? So just go away.

Rayanne: You’re not the only one who got hurt.
Angela: Well, forgive me if I can’t feel sorry for you, Rayanne.
Rayanne: You lost nothing, Angela. You lost a lousy, selfish friend, a guy you never really had… you lost nothing! …. I lost a really good friend! I lost everything.

And then comes the part where I cry and cry. It’s better on the show than in the book.

YA? Why… not.

So I mentioned that Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE was nearly the only YA book I brought on my vacation (it’s true! I’ve been reading adult fiction up the wazoo!), and iloveamandabynes, AKA my long lost camp roommate, said in comments that she’s been reading it and hadn’t even realized it was YA. Which made me remember that Donnelly also writes for adults, and just because the book looks like YA — the cover and, especially, the page and font size — don’t make it so. In fact, a cursory look at the quotes on the cover would’ve made it obvious that this is clearly not being sold as YA.

…As would’ve simply flipping open to the first sentence: “Polly Nichols, a Whitechapel whore, was profoundly grateful to gin.” Um, yeah. I know YA’s gone through some dark phases, but no.*

The thing, though? I’m still in the first five pages, but this is so written like YA. Check out this paragraph:

Not come to the river? she thought, admiring the silvery Thames as it shimmered in the August sunshine. Who could resist it? Lively waves slapped impatiently at the bottom of the Old Stairs, spraying her. She watched them inching toward her and fancied that the river wanted to touch her toes, swirl up over her ankles, draw her into its beckoning waters, and carry her along with it. Oh, if only she could go.

Seriously, adults read this stuff? …I mean, adults who don’t primarily read books for teenagers. Which, apparently, qualification needs making. **

* By the way, has anyone ever seen an authorial narrator — as opposed to a character — ever refer to anyone, in any YA book, as a “whore”? I’d be stunned but now I’m curious.

** By the way ^2, I would love to hear y’all’s thoughts on whether it’s true that more adults read YA now (it certainly feels true, but given that I’m an adult YA blogger, I kind of think my anecdotal evidence may be selective…) and if lack of plot in adult literary fiction is why. Grossman’s response to critics is here.

Why I Love It: A Northern Light

One interesting thing about Jennifer Donnelly’s A NORTHERN LIGHT is that I think I love the book for different reasons than she does.

In an interview I read, Donnelly talks about how the whole book was inspired by Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which apparently played a central role in Donnelly’s own life. Her book is framed around this classic story, set in 1906: a young woman and young man go out boating, and she drowns. Can you guess what happened and why?

I’m not even directly familiar with Dreiser’s book, but I knew from page one what had happened; that’s what a childhood spent watching Lifetime Original Movies will do to you. This part of the story didn’t grab me at all, because the “mystery” was so easily solved, and the dead woman, Grace, didn’t develop enough to interest me. (Even though the book is built around this subplot, it’s actually rather peripheral to the main characters’ emotional journey, which is really just as well.)

However. The original story that Donnelly created around this now-cliched tale is fascinating and, for me, was almost absurdly moving. The main characters are Mattie, a white girl, and Weaver, a black boy, best friends and poor teenagers whose one hope is to escape their confining town in the Adirondacks and make their way to college. They both wind up working at the ritzy Glenmore Hotel (where they intersect with Grace’s murder) as a way to earn their keep (and, in Mattie’s case, get a measure of independence from her family), but subsequent events destroy each of their seemingly best strategies for finding their freedom.

The book’s central tension is in showing all the ways the deck is stacked against these characters, while nevertheless showing how deeply their own choices matter. Weaver’s one act of resistance has tremendously negative consequences, leaving the question of whether he should have protected himself by not standing up for himself — and what emotional price he would have paid for that choice. The fact that neither option was remotely acceptable is not belabored by Donnelly; it’s simply obvious from the character she’s created, and it’s a deeply painful and unfair fact. Meanwhile, Donnelly manages, with great skill, to end the book hopefully without seeming for a moment like she’s settled for an easy answer for her characters.

Indeed, A NORTHERN LIGHT ends with more questions about Mattie’s and Weaver’s future than it does with any certainty. I found this absolutely maddening as a reader, because I cared about these characters so deeply — for days after I read it last summer, I could not get them out of my head — but she couldn’t have done it any other way. A NORTHERN LIGHT is a very original and powerful story, no matter what cliched origins have left their scars in the setup.