Henry James and the YA Debate

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 3:24 pm by Alissa Wilkinson

Henry James and the YA Debate 2015-03-13T15:24:43-05:00 Alissa Wilkinson

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There’s plenty of talk these days about whether adults should be spending so much time – as they are – on young adult (or “YA”) novels, or if they need to be reading more weighty books. Over at The New Yorker, Christopher Beha explores what the nineteenth-century author Henry James has to do with all of this:

When I mentioned this plan to friends, their responses fell roughly into two camps. “How impressive,” some said. “Better you than me,” others said. They seemed to take for granted that such a project was an exercise in self-discipline or self-improvement, not something that one did just for fun. But that was exactly why I was doing it. Occasionally, reading James stopped being fun and, when it did, I stopped reading him, sometimes for months at a time. Eventually, I came back, because so few other writers offer the particular pleasures that James does. It’s true that some of the later books are imposing—nineteenth-century realist comedies have given way to twentieth-century modernist monuments. But, precisely because I’d been reading my way through this evolution, I was prepared for the change. I had come to know intimately James’s way of looking at the world, and how it had pushed him toward implication and indirection, so I was in a better position to appreciate (and enjoy) the result.

Of course, the friends who suggested that reading James was an act of self-discipline were just making polite conversation. But I’ve been thinking about those remarks recently, because there has been so much talk of late about what and why we read.

Read the whole thing here.

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