It took a surprisingly long time for bad parents to show up in children’s books. Did you ever notice how few there are, compared with, say, the self-centered and murderous parents in Greek mythology or the Bible? In American literature, children’s and adult books didn’t sharply diverge as categories until the 20th century, so it’s not clear whether we should even include that mean, kidnapping drunk, Pap Finn.
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Maybe you can think of more recent examples than “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1885) — the gallant, no-good father from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943)? — but in the classic stories, from “Cinderella” to “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the hero’s parents are more likely to be absent or dead than cruel or incompetent. In fact, it’s the removal of the adult’s protective presence that kick-starts the story, so the orphan can begin his “triumphant rise” (as Dave Eggers put it in his memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” after it actually happened to him). In the move to independence, the parent is all but forgotten, or occasionally pictured in a fond glow of love and regret.
And then the young adult novel came along.
Judging from The New York Times children’s best-seller list and librarian-approved selections like the annual “Best Books for Young Adults,” the bad parent is now enjoying something of a heyday. It would be hard to come up with an exact figure from the thousands of Y.A. novels published every year, but what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.
In a typical scene, from “Once Was Lost,” by Sara Zarr, a dad whose wife is at a “recovery center” after a D.U.I. needs help shopping at a supermarket. He shouldn’t be filling the cart with vegetables, his 15-year-old daughter says. “It’s all . . . ingredients,” she explains patiently. “Who’s going to cook this stuff?” He stands by in confusion as she selects precooked chicken breasts. In Natalie Standiford’s “How to Say Goodbye in Robot,” the mother — a haunting figure — has become strangely accident-prone, tripping over things, “catching her hair in the fan”; “We were used to Mom hurting herself,” the narrator says.
Sometimes the parents are very, very busy, and sometimes they’ve simply checked out. The husband of the accident-prone mother is never home at night. It’s not that he’s with another woman; he’s working late at the Johns Hopkins bio lab. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s best-selling “Wintergirls,” about a dangerously anorexic high school senior, the mom is a sought-after surgeon too pressed to notice that her malnourished daughter is a bit shorter than she was four years earlier.
Like the clownish adults on the Disney Channel or “Modern Family,” the not-in-charge, curiously diminished parent is just sort of there, part of the scenery. You can even spot the type in three best-selling fantasy series: “Twilight,” “Shiver” and “The Hunger Games.” In “Twilight,” the only reason Bella meets the supernaturally good-looking Edward in the first place is that she has moved to her father’s place in gloomy Forks, Wash.; that way, her mother can follow around after her new husband, a minor-league ballplayer. “I stared at her wild, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic hare-brained mother to fend for herself?” (Edward’s own parents are charming, competent and rich, but they are vampires.)
Afflicted by anomie, sitting down to another dismal meal or rushing out the door to a meeting, the hapless parents of Y.A. fiction are slightly ridiculous. They put in an appearance at the stove and behind the wheel of the car, but you can see right through them.
When young adult fiction was a brand-new genre, in the 1960s, it fit in neatly with the classic narratives: its strongest stories were about orphans and lost boys of one kind or another. The hero’s “triumphant rise” often looked like a struggle for survival. “The Outsiders” (1967) and “Rumble Fish” (1975), by S. E. Hinton, and Robert Lipsyte’s “Contender” (1967) are all novels in which the protagonists are orphans or might as well be. “It was like she was dead,” Rusty-James says of his mother in “Rumble Fish.” “I’d always thought of her as being dead.” (In fact she’s in California, about to move into a treehouse with her boyfriend, an artist.)
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