(from booklistonline.com
by Michael Cart)
What’s in a name? Before there were new adults, there were adultescents, kidults, twixters and boomerangers, yet despite the diversity of their names, they were all the same thing: post–high school young people, aged roughly 19 to 28, who had yet to leave home. Though embracing the same age range, the term “new adult” is a more recent one, coined in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press when it issued a call for “fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of older YA or new adult.”
I would amend St. Martin’s statement only by pointing out that this new adult fiction can be published and marketed not only as adult but also as young adult with crossover appeal to adults (think, for example, of The Hunger Games and Twilight). We’ll address this crossover matter in a moment, but first let’s talk briefly about these new adults, this generation of 19- to 28-year-old stay-at-homes.
Since the early years of this century, a growing number of developmental psychologists, doctors, sociologists, and neuroscientists have been studying this age group and, calling it “the second decade of adolescence,” concluding that it constitutes a new, distinct life stage. A leading expert, Dr. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett calls it “emerging adulthood,” but I would stick with “new adulthood.”
This said—and presuming there is, indeed, a new, distinct life stage we can call new adult—it surely demands a new literature to meet its members’ personal needs and interests, just as the then-new category of human being called “young adult” did fiftysomething years ago. “Personal needs” include psychological, socioeconomic, emotional, and developmental ones. In a YALSA White Paper, I argue that young adult literature can meet those needs for young adults. I’m now arguing that the same can be said of new adult literature. But that begs the question, What exactly is new adult literature?
An answer emerges from the multigenerational popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, which led publishers to begin experimenting with the publication of other titles having similar multigenerational appeal. I’m talking now about “crossover books,” titles that may be published as either YA or adult but in either case have appeal to both older teens and to new adults. I should probably stress here that there is often a very fine line between “crossover” and “new adult,” just as there is sometimes a very fine line between young adult and new adult. I mean, forget theory for a moment and acknowledge the reality that we’re talking about a human continuum here. We might glibly say that the day you turn 19, you stop being a young adult and become a new adult, but that’s ridiculous. The process is one of evolution, and it will proceed at different rates for different young people. As a result, many crossover books do have appeal to both YAs and NAs, and—despite what some publishers might say—it makes no difference whether they are published as adult or as young adult. They will reach both audiences in either case.
Two early examples of this type of crossover book are Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the story of a troubled 14-year-old boy who finds his future in friendship, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the unusual tale of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who sets out to solve a mystery. Both of these books were published as adult, but for a more recent example published as YA, look no further than Aidan Chambers’ This Is All, a psychologically acute portrait of a 19-year-old girl named Cordelia Kenn.
Any consideration of crossovers inevitably raises another question: What factors distinguish a traditional YA novel from a crossover/new adult novel? Well, yes. I would argue, for example, that the latter—the new adult novel—is more often character- rather than simply plot-driven; the setting is often more fully realized; adult characters (i.e., post-28) may play significant parts; and the subject matter, if not more sophisticated, at least receives a more subtle treatment, except, perhaps, for sex, which can be more prevalent—and, uh, more specific in some new adult books than in YA. Finally, the chances of ambiguity in new adult are greater than in YA. All that said, two principal areas of commonality between YA and new adult are (1) the age of the protagonist relative to the age of the readership (young adult protagonists need to be 12 to 18; new adult protagonists need to be 19 to 28), and (2) the coming-of-age-nature of the narrative.
It would simplify a whole complexity of issues if publishers were to officially recognize the new adult and begin publishing books specifically targeted at this readership and labeled as such, but that’s unlikely to happen for organizational and economic reasons, so in the meantime, young adult librarians need to be familiar with both adult and young adult literature in order to find and acquire new adult novels. That’s a tall order, but don’t look to the mass media for help, since it has a clearly benighted vision of new adult. For example, one ABC feature about this incipient field was headlined “Emerging New Adult Book Genre Puts Smut Fiction on Bestsellers Lists: New Adult Merges Young Adult with Erotic Fiction and Authors are Cashing In.” The article highlights the self-published adult author Cora Carmack, but it might also have included Abbi Glines, Jamie McGuire, and Jennifer L. Armentrout, all of whom have recently made a splash with their steamy, self-published fiction.
Leave it to the media to sensationalize an issue that requires more serious attention and analysis. However, space dictates such attention will have to wait for a future column, but in the meantime, let’s not lose sight of the fact that new adult refers not only to an abstract genre or a concept but also to individual human beings who deserve and need good literature that speaks to them and their individual needs.
Stay tuned. More to come soon.
Michael Cart is the author of Cart’s Top 200 Adult Books for Young Adults: Two Decades in Review (ALA Editions, 2012).
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