I first heard a novel nonsexually described as “adult” in an episode of The Book Review podcast by The New York Times a couple of years ago. The exact episode I cannot find, but the hosts were discussing Wallace Stegner, whom I hadn’t at the time heard of. Shame on me, I guess.
His writing was adult, they posited, because Stegner was writing about issues not inherently interesting to younger readers — younger being, I think, a euphemism for under 30. I was still under 30, myself, so I promptly ordered a copy of Stegner’s Crossing to Safety to find out what it was I wasn’t thinking about.
Looking at the book, which is now folded into a pile of picture books in my kids’ playroom for some reason, the designation makes sense: it follows two couples who befriend each other and stay friends for decades. It’s told mostly in flashbacks. It’s not exactly a banger at face value. It’s slow, careening, and attempts to cover the swath of a life. You could comp it to This is Us, frankly, and I don’t mean that derogatorily.
This past week, I listened to Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, a “fairytale” of sorts that follows two siblings whose mother runs away, whose father prematurely dies, and whose stepmother promptly kicks them out of their home (the Dutch house) with nothing but access to an education trust. The younger brother, who is also the narrator, describes all of this in great detail, including how, even though his sister is forcing him to go to Columbia Med (lol), all he wants is to be in real estate like his dad was (lol).
It’s not a story with a high-drama hook. The stakes are … there … loosely. (What will they do? What will happen to the house?) But otherwise, it’s really just a story of being alive. There are marriages and divorces and illnesses and deaths and prodigal family members; there is wasted time, failed career attempts, and failures to meet familial expectations.
About halfway through, I turned to my husband and asked: How does someone even sell a book like this? (The answer, of course, is be Ann Patchett and all that being Ann Patchett entails. Love you, Ann.) Really though, would love to see the sales pitch. This relates to what I was talking about last week, in terms of absolutely bananas twists that come out of nowhere in a lot of commercial/upmarket fiction. Are they for the story, or are they for the sales? When do those two priorities diverge? The Dutch House is the antithesis of this.
Another way to frame this is by thinking about the appeal of “adult” books. Up until very recently, I was a sucker for any variation of the adolescent/twenty-something coming-of-age genre. I re-watched Dawson’s Creek. Friends. I occasion to pick up a YA novel about bratty rich kids. I read and loved The Secret History, obviously. We even re-read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for TV’s book club not that long ago. What those stories gave me, initially, was a roadmap (how does one grow old), and then, later, a nostalgic reckoning (how did I grow old). Sometime around 30, around getting married and deciding I didn’t want to be a full-time reporter and I didn’t want to stay up late every night just to see what would happen (i.e. growing older), those stories carried less appeal to me.
The characters in those stories stopped being so relatable. Their feelings and their dreams were big, but they were also, at the same time, both narrow and indistinct. Charlie wants friends, Dawson wants to make movies, Ross wants Rachel, Richard Papen wants to fit in, and so on. They lacked, because of age and limited lived experience, the ability to conceptualize either what they would do after achieving those goals, or how their relationships might suffer or grow at the expense of those goals. All of them were shocked when confronted with the consequences of their actions. A good chunk of them didn’t even have fully developed brains yet.
So, then, how do characters in “adult” stories fare? Well, for one, they spend most of their time looking backward, either to make sense of their life as it’s currently shaped, or else to justify it. The Dutch House is implicitly told in retrospect, for example. One gleans this from the bucolic tone of the narrator, as well as passing references to events to come. There is a sense of supreme calm, even in crisis, ostensibly because the narrator already knows how the story ends. This happens, to an extent, in television shows like This is Us, and maybe even Parenthood, both multigenerational family sagas arguably aimed at the above-30 set. This is Us achieved this through extensive flashback use. Viewers were given hints about characters getting sick, dying, having children and more because the timeline was never static. Patchett deployed this technique in The Dutch House as well.
Doing this creates the sense, or at least the illusion, of being inside a story that has already happened. Of, maybe, listening to your grandmother talk about, on a lazy afternoon, her childhood. And she’s made it out in one piece, hasn’t she? She’s survived, in one way or another, the losses and the catastrophes and the new homes and new children and the marriages and the divorces. She must have, she’s sitting right in front of you.
Whereas the youthful bildungsroman doesn’t know where it’s going (a murder! drugs! discovering your parents are people!), the adult novel is more concerned about why and how. Not so much the what. You trust that the storyteller already knows how the story ends; you put yourself at ease and allow yourself to drift. It’s familiar, even though it isn’t. It can’t be. It’s not your life. But, maybe — in some form, in some aspects — it could have been.
xoxo
Monica
What did you think of Crossing to Safety?!