FROM THAT FEARSOME ZONE BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND ADULTHOOD

Author: By Ellen Wittlinger

Date: SUNDAY, July 19, 1998

Page: C4

Section: Books

I think these books get caught in our psyches because emotions run so strong for teenagers -- who are, after all, experiencing all the big ones, for the first time, in just a few short years (love around one corner, humiliation or fear around the next). And maybe they still resonate because they take us back to that time, which, no matter how loudly we proclaim the horrors of it, was the period in our lives in which we were most likely to be ruled by our passions.

The books I mention were published as adult novels and are still sold as such, though in many progressive bookstores a few copies are also shelved with an odd amalgam of books designated ``young adult novels'' -- usually on a short aisle at the fringes of the children's department, a spot nowhere near the adult fiction. It's a section seldom visited by anyone but librarians, enlightened teachers, and the odd voracious reader of any age who has discovered the gold to be found in these most overlooked books. Teenagers, who should be their audience, seem either to get stuck in the series-book genres (horror, mystery, romance) or to skip directly to Dorothy Allison, Toni Morrison, and John Irving, thereby pleasing ambitious parents and simultaneously taking a leap into an adult world they're anxious to enter. But here's the secret I want to whisper in your ear: Young adult books are terrific, and they are literature.

I know there are teenagers who would list ``Beloved,'' ``Bastard Out of Carolina,'' and ``The World According to Garp'' as favorite books. But these novels weren't written for teenagers; they were written to speak to adults.

Which is not to say younger readers get nothing from such novels, only that they will get much more when their own experience catches up to that of the author. Why aren't they, instead, reading ``young adult novels'' that speak directly to the heart and soul of teenagers? In these books they can see themselves reflected as they are, not as they will be. The truths are their own truths.

Cards on the table: I've been a children's librarian; I'm now an author of young adult novels. So I have a vested interest in getting you to take a look at a genre it might never occur to you to take seriously. And not only to buy them for your children or your nephews or the girl next door (though that would be wonderful) but also to read them yourself, to see if you can't, in fact, go home again, to that frightening, fantastic, poignant place called adolescence.

It's no easy task to choose my favorite young-adult author, but of all those I love it's Brock Cole to whom I return obsessively. Cole's first young-adult novel, ``The Goats,'' opens with Howie being stripped naked by boys from his summer camp and abandoned on a mosquito-ridden island at night. Within moments he finds an old cabin and inside it Laura, the other goat, the one chosen by the girls. It's clear to these two unfortunate souls why they were made the butt of this horrible joke; they feel so despised, and thus despicable, they can't stand each other either. But finally, each other is all they have, and escaping from the island and the camp, they make each other all they need. Howie and Laura demand not our sympathy but our respect as they come to terms with an unfair world in which they must figure out how to survive.

Cole followed this novel with a very different one, ``Celine,'' a brilliant portrait of a 16-year-old artist who, despite living in a world of selfish, unreliable adults (including a 22-year-old stepmother), manages to save herself and her 9-year-old neighbor by looking life right in the eyeballs and laughing at it. Celine's is the most authentic teenage voice I've read in fiction written for any age group. Here she is trying to seem intriguing to an older man: ``I fake a pose in case he is looking -- that of a young, self-confident girl not given to idle chitchat, a still center in a world going mad. A slight, mysterious smile plays about her mouth. . . . No, that's not working. I feel as if I've developed a third lip.'' Celine reminds us of what it's like to be a smart kid who just can't get any credit for it. Her narration leaves me laughing out loud, no matter how often I read it.

In Virginia Euwer Wolff's wonderful verse novel, ``Make Lemonade,'' 14-year-old LaVaughn wants a job to save money for college, a place no one in her family -- indeed, no one in all the 64 apartments in her building -- has ever gone. But the job she finds, baby-sitting for the two young children of unmarried, 17-year-old Jolly, is a great deal more than she bargained for. ``This Jolly's apartment is disorderly and it smells,'' LaVaughn says. ``But I can see right away there's a lot causing it.'' It's LaVaughn's ability to see things so clearly that helps her cut a path through the chaos not only for herself but also for her new friend, too. Woolf creates an entire gallery of characters you'll never forget, and the spare blank verse in which the story is told makes you realize the extent to which poetry is inherent in ordinary speech. Listen to LaVaughn: ``This word COLLEGE is in my house, / and you have to walk around it in the rooms / like furniture.''

M. E. Kerr has written more than a dozen wonderful young-adult novels. Start with ``Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack,'' a novel brimful of wisecracking, oddball kids, all searching for a measure of understanding from their parents and peers. Besides Dinky herself, an extremely overweight girl who uses sarcasm as a lethal weapon, there's Tucker, a poet who's been in Corrective Posture classes for two years; Natalia, an obsessive rhymer; and P. John, an opinionated young man whose hero is Senator Joseph McCarthy. The parents of these four are an equally colorful crew. The dialogue is fast and funny (when Dinky's father tries to give P. John cab fare home, the younger man refuses, saying, ``I'm one of the few New Yorkers not on the dole,'') but the feelings between these four troubled kids become woven into a complex net strong enough to keep them all from falling through.

I have a deep respect for these authors and others like them -- Chris Crutcher, Rob Thomas, Lois Lowry, Avi, Anne Fine, Chris Lynch, Joan Bauer, Ron Koertge, Jacqueline Woodson, and many, many more -- who keep writing marvelous, heartbreaking books that neither unseat the ``classics'' from the classroom nor displace the scores of horror and fantasy books in the hearts of the teenagers they hope to reach. Maybe some of you who missed these books during your own youth will back up and read them now. You won't regret it.

There was no ``young adult'' designation when ``Catcher in the Rye'' and ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' and ``A Separate Peace'' were published. If there had been, these books might well have gone out of print in a few years due to low sales figures and so been lost to our children. To all of us. What wonderful books like them are we losing now?