We will always be young adults
India still does not have its Judy Blume, but a clutch of new books are pushing the boundaries of the genre of YA
I read Priyanka Mookerjee’s Hedon in big gulps, taking breaks because I had to, because its intensity clung to me in an almost oppressive way. In fact, I don’t think I realised till I was done reading that I had liked the book; that this dense, raw world with its fevered pace had appealed to me. Till I finished, I hadn’t had time to think; the pages crowded, words tumbling over each other in a rush to tell their story.
But afterwards, I wondered. Here is this new book with its fairly typical world, created with building blocks we know far too well now — a young girl (“plain”, precocious) and an older man (handsome, unattainable), a meet-cute that almost borders on trite, and the story of an Indian girl in a college abroad, juggling aspirations and heartbreaks and temptations. Routine stuff, really. So why does it work? Why does this young adult novel, with all its expected ingredients and predictable plot twists, seem to stand a little apart?
Expectation and reality
More than anything else, it is perhaps how the book feels that distinguishes it; how its convoluted, angst-ridden self-awareness stops just short of posturing, so while you expect one thing (teen pop romance laced with tried and tested tropes), you get quite another (a kind of breathless unravelling of everything, all at once). Young adult fiction’s late entry to the Indian literary market makes Hedonespecially rare, and I cannot find the exact comparison by an Indian author. The only one that perhaps comes close is Jobless Clueless Reckless by Revathi Suresh, published in 2013 by Duckbill. Suresh’s intelligent grasp on the teenage psyche and her easy ability to navigate its labyrinth finds an echo inHedon, but whereas Suresh’s voice is younger, Mookerjee’s is older and somehow darker.
More than anything else, it is perhaps how the book feels that distinguishes it; how its convoluted, angst-ridden self-awareness stops just short of posturing, so while you expect one thing (teen pop romance laced with tried and tested tropes), you get quite another (a kind of breathless unravelling of everything, all at once). Young adult fiction’s late entry to the Indian literary market makes Hedonespecially rare, and I cannot find the exact comparison by an Indian author. The only one that perhaps comes close is Jobless Clueless Reckless by Revathi Suresh, published in 2013 by Duckbill. Suresh’s intelligent grasp on the teenage psyche and her easy ability to navigate its labyrinth finds an echo inHedon, but whereas Suresh’s voice is younger, Mookerjee’s is older and somehow darker.
At one level, Hedon was familiar to me in the way my own teenage years are — hazy half-memories that seem both intensely private and completely alien. It reminded me that while I can pretend I’ve forgotten how seventeen felt, its raw intensity is easy to summon. At least, Hedon helps make it easy.
The book’s protagonist Tara Mullick’s life isn’t every teenager’s life. It was certainly not mine, but even while her own world follows a trajectory I cannot draw parallels with, it is the voice Mookerjee gives her that pulls at you — its vulnerability, beating steadily behind the thin veneer of nonchalant self-confidence that only teenagers can pull off, so that Tara shifts between an indulgent assurance of her own intelligence and a deep insecurity about her own place in the world she inhabits. I’ve seen that voice used before, but rarely, so that when it does appear, it holds you captive. It creates a book that only just fits into that youth adult shelf we’ve created, its pages bleeding into all the other spaces that surround it. The label refuses to stick, and you find that there’s no space for it anyway, because while you’ve got yourself a book that’s about a young adult, written in the voice of a young adult, and entirely accessible to young adults, you’ve also got a book that belongs to every reader who picks it up.
Perhaps that statement is true of any book. But reading Hedon reminded me of how amorphous the term ‘young adult’ really is. How fiction overtly written for this age bracket exists in a state of perpetual shift, so that sometimes it seems strange that we’ve set these limits at all; that when it comes to books, we are so sure about what goes where. After all, in life, things are a lot more muddled, the lines a lot more blurred. Who can tell, really, when exactly they grew up?
When Tara falls immediately and completely in love with a near stranger, she’s just seventeen; when she writes poetry for her dead neighbour or when she tumbles through chapters’ worth of casual sex and experimental drugs, you see awkward innocence in her desperate rush to grow up. You see her pull and push at these conflicting notes, and when the plot seems to spiral out of control, Mookerjee keeps up, laying down for us the very moments that change Tara. Together, these moments become the strength of the book, lending it a kind of universally relatable quality that has nothing to do with actual plot developments.
The voice of the teenager
Perhaps this is why there are so many adults dipping into young adult fiction, and why books like Hedoncannot entirely define their readership. I remember reading Judy Blume in school, going through her books one after the other in a greedy rush to read them all. I always devoured them with a kind of guilty thrill, because back then Blume’s books were really a few of the only ones that would discuss certain things — puberty, sex, boys, death, even love in a way — with a frankness that was refreshing and unnerving. I don’t know how Blume did it, but she made her teenagers breathe — she made them say and do things that rang true, and her books pulsated with unfettered honesty. When I pick up the same books now, the voice is just as honest, the book just as relatable. Only, I find myself appreciating things I didn’t then. I know that I’m not reading a different book; just reading it differently.
Perhaps this is why there are so many adults dipping into young adult fiction, and why books like Hedoncannot entirely define their readership. I remember reading Judy Blume in school, going through her books one after the other in a greedy rush to read them all. I always devoured them with a kind of guilty thrill, because back then Blume’s books were really a few of the only ones that would discuss certain things — puberty, sex, boys, death, even love in a way — with a frankness that was refreshing and unnerving. I don’t know how Blume did it, but she made her teenagers breathe — she made them say and do things that rang true, and her books pulsated with unfettered honesty. When I pick up the same books now, the voice is just as honest, the book just as relatable. Only, I find myself appreciating things I didn’t then. I know that I’m not reading a different book; just reading it differently.
Over the years, I’ve come across several voices that have reminded me, in one way or the other, of Blume’s. Before, these were books written by international authors, reaching India with their stories intact, even if their context gained distance — the once obscure cult favourite, Christopher Pike, with his dark and disturbing world brimming with the unnatural and supernatural; Lois Lowry’s The Giver with its beautiful complexity; or Sherman Alexie’s The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian riddled with the kind of funny that twists your stomach and makes you grin, all at the same time. These will thankfully keep coming, but now our options back home are steadily growing, whether it is Paro Anand’s gritty attempts to explain and understand a world from the eyes of a teenager, Himanjali Sankar’s exploration of homosexuality in Talking of Muskaan, or Mookerjee’s Hedon.
swati.d@thehindu.co.in
Source: The Hindu, 24-05-2016
