BOYS BOOKS OR LAD LIT

From the ongoing "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the Record Review -- April, 2004

Works mentioned in this piece: Bridget Jones's Diary, Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Love Monkey, Bastard on the Couch, Booty Nomad, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, 1,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Road to Home, High Wide and Lonesome, Parade's End, Regeneration, Eye in the Door, Ghost Road, Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, Girl at the Lion D'Or, Honor Bound, Brotherhood of War, The Corps,
Men at War, Retreat, Hell, Dog Soldiers, Things They Carried, Going
After Cacciato, In Country, Silent Men, Slingshot.

BOYS' BOOKS OR LAD LIT?


Oh, No! It had to happen. The New York Times informs us there is a new genre
out there that publishers hope will “turn the vulnerabilities and anxieties of young
men into a commercial tsunami equal to that created by books like "Bridget Jones’s
Diary" by Helen Fielding, (more than two million copies sold) and "The Girls’
Guide to Hunting and Fishing" by Melissa Bank, which has sold about one
million.” Titles mentioned in the NYT piece include "Love Monkey" by
Kyle Smith, "The Bastard On The Couch," by Daniel Jones (Smith and Jones?)
and "Booty Nomad" by Scott Mebus. I have no interest, that is zero interest,
in reading any of these and I don't know a man, young or old, who would, either.

This so-called “Lad Lit” is a different kind of book than what I think of as “Boys’
Books.” When I was a kid, there were many boys’ books I didn’t read -- probably
because they seldom included girl characters. Such boy books as "Kidnapped,"
"Treasure Island," "1,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Huckleberry Finn," or
"Tom Sawyer," I read only if I had to for school. Later on, books by Horatio
Alger, Joseph Conrad, Brett Harte, Daniel Defoe, and Herman Melville, fell into
the boy book category as far as I was concerned.

Vartan Gregorian has written about his life in "The Road To Home" (Simon
&Schuster, 2003) and he describes reading as a child in Tabriz, Iran, “…late into
the night, with the help of kerosene lamps, often secretly, past my bedtime.” He
says reading became a compulsion and, of course, it was an escape. He read boy
books and, as he says, “…lived vicariously the lives of such protagonists as
Robinson Crusoe, Jean Valjean, the Count of Monte Cristo, the Three Musketeers,
Romeo, Werther, Sinbad, Kim…” He says, “The protagonists of many books
I read became lifetime companions.”

I was grown up when I quit avoiding boys' books. I remember listening on tape
to "High, Wide and Lonesome," a boyhood memoir by Hal Borland.
Borland’s wonderful account of homesteading days in an isolated “soddy” cabin
made of earth in the high prairie of Colorado is a book I recommend to every
young person and to older people for whom, like Borland, this country’s frontier
past is not ancient history.

Not knowing much about World War I, I read the four novels which make up
Ford Maddox Ford’s dark and tragic "Parade’s End," (Knopf, 1924-1928) a
sequence about Britain before, during and after the war. Pat Barker’s haunting
WWI Billy Pryor trilogy: "Regeneration," "Eye in the Door," and "The Ghost
Road," (Random House) deals with, among other things, the harrowing war in
the trenches of France and the psychiatric treatment of shell-shocked veterans
throughout and after the War. Also about World War I and written in the 1990’s
are Sebastian Faulks’s "Birdsong," "Charlotte Gray," and "Girl at the Lion D’Or."
(all Random House).

I’ve racketed through most of W.E.B. Griffin WWII war/adventure books
grouped in series with titles such as “Honor Bound”, “Brotherhood of War”,
“The Corps”, “Men at War”, and so on -- a total of more than 25 novels, some
of them close to 500 pages long. Many characters stay around throughout the series,
there are a few good women characters and there is more than enough history and
action plus a little romance to keep this reader interested. Right now, I’m working
on Griffin’s "Retreat, Hell" (2003) a big, thick novel that is also a history of the
American role in the Korean War.

I read Vietnam novels. Robert Stone’s (do not confuse with Oliver Stone) "Dog
Soldiers," his second novel ( Houghton,1973), brings the war home in body bags
filled with dope. Stone is one of those tough, macho writers whose work is heretical,
sardonic and bleak. In my opinion, although his books have always sold, Stone has
never been properly renown and this may have more to do with Stone himself than
it has to do with the quality of his writing. Also on any Vietnam War reading list should
be Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried" (Houghton, 1990) and
"Going After Cacciato."(Delacorte, 1978) and Bobbie Ann Mason’s "In Country"
(Harper, 1984), all now available in paperback reprints.

Right now, my favorite Vietnam book is "The Silent Men" by Richard Dickinson
(Rugged Land, 2002) about a US Army sniper in the Mekong Delta. This is by
far the most unsparing Vietnam book I’ve come across and I don’t know what
happened to it, although it still exists in a few local libraries. After a few good reviews,
it sank. Too real, too true, snipers too scary, maybe, and not promoted by the publisher,
most likely. "Silent Men" should become a movie. Supposedly, it is the first of future
books about the sniper main character but 'Silent Men" is going to be a tough act for
Dickinson to follow.

Dickinson’s book is set during the same time and place as Ed Vick’s novel/memoir,
"Slingshot" (Bedford Press, 2002). Vick is putting the proceeds from the book into
a Vietnam veterans’ families fund he started.

It’s not all modern war for me. I raced through the Napoleonic War seagoing
series by Patrick O’Brien – all 21 volumes. I read them with maps and charts
and I have considered starting again from the beginning. I always liked
C. S. Forester’s Hornblower who is the prototype for the O’Brien books, and
I tried Dewey Lambdin’s series which I couldn’t get into. These are all boys’ books
but I know many women who’ve read them with the greatest pleasure. One friend
said women like the O’Brien books because medical man/spy Maturin is so inept
at sea and in battle that women sympathize. The heroic character of Aubrey, she
says, is like so many husbands: steadfast and true lovers by long distance and
happiest when they’re away at work. Put them into portside domestic reality
for two weeks and they can’t wait to ship out.

Lad Lit books aren’t doing so well but I can’t work up too much sympathy. In June
(for Fathers’ Day?) we’ll see an essay anthology edited by Daniel Jones titled
"The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings
About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom" (Morrow, 2004) The publisher,
in a 50,000 printing, is hoping this collection will build on the successful
"The Bitch In The House" edited by Cathi Hanauer (Morrow, 2002) who happens
to be Jones’s wife. Will women want to read about what the bastard on the couch
really thinks?

A March, 2004 issue of “Publishers’ Weekly” asks, “What if publishers created
a subgenre and nobody read it?” and a Borders fiction buyer says, “The only place
Lad Lit exists as a viable genre is in the imaginations of the publishers.” As PW
puts it, the fact is, sales are slow and reviews aren’t helping. So far there don’t
seem to be enough young male buyers to keep the subgenre going and it could
be the market will decide the end of it.

They can keep their Lad Lit. I’ll stick to Boys’ Books.

***

Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of "Bookworms: Great
Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (Carroll&Graf, 1997.)