There’s an obscure late 1990s movie that has one key moment that pops into my head every few months. The Big Kahuna (destined now to remain obscure because one of its leads is the disgraced Kevin Spacey) is an adaptation of a three-handed stage play about a trio of company reps in a hospitality suite at a trade convention. They’re there to pitch a big client – Danny DeVito and Spacey play the veteran reps, Phil and Larry. These are both guys who give the impression of being on their third marriages; Phil’s quit drinking recently.
With them is Bob, played by a young Peter Facinelli. Bob is very young, very clean cut, very religious. If you grew up in a Bible Belt-ish town, you’ve met this guy – he’s moral and upstanding, married young, probably genuinely nice, and sometimes so sure of himself you wish you could just punch him right in his shiny white teeth.
Anyway, late in the movie, Bob done goes and fucks up. He runs into the titular Big Kahuna, and instead of pitching for the company, i.e. doing his job, he just talks Jesus and salvation. Because that’s what you do when you’re young and convinced you’ve got a greater mission than selling industrial whatever, whether the company’s future is on the line or not.
When the veteran salesmen find out, Larry storms off, and Phil rips into Bob. His speech starts with slow-burning anger, but by the end, he’s run out of steam. He’s mostly sad. Bob isn’t trying to connect with people honestly, Phil says. Bob lacks character. Phil makes Bob cry.
And then we get the exchange that’s stuck with me since I watched this movie on VHS.
“The question is, do you have any character at all?” Phil says. “And if you want my honest opinion, Bob, you do not. For the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.”
“You’re saying I won’t have any character, unless I do something I regret?”
“No, Bob,” Phil says, and DeVito looks sad and frustrated here, like he can’t believe he has to further clarify this point to this child who thinks he’s an actual adult. “I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are.”
And as DeVito keeps speaking, about regret, what it’s like to carry it around with you, to live with it, to let it shape you, you can see that he’s talking about his own regrets, as a guy who’s had fifty-some-odd years to think deeply about all the ways he’s fucked up that are beyond fixing.
That scene – the philosophy embodied by that scene – is why I don’t read much YA science fiction and fantasy anymore.
Please don’t misread this as some kind of screed against YA in general, some kind of asinine “YA is dumbing down literature!” hot take. Read YA! Lots of YA is very well written! I am not the Book Police!
It’s just that YA does some things well, and it does other things less well, or not at all. And increasingly, I find that what I want from my reading, SFF or otherwise, is not to be found on the YA shelves.
Since I’m being mildly contrarian, let me first say that YA is popular with so many adults because the dominant theme of the category is coming of age. And that’s a universal theme!* Everyone over twelve years old is either somewhere in the process of coming of age, or they have been through it already, and the YA age group is one of the last where people have a lot of common social and emotional experiences, like first loves.
A great many YA stories, especially in SFF where The Fate Of Worlds Hang In the Balance, put their young characters in highly charged situations where they have to decide what kind of a person they want to be. And if you do that well, very well indeed, I will still be interested. And if you do it less well, I will be bored, because a lot of seventeen year olds are twerps, even in fiction.
A lot of teenagers are still Bob. They’re filled with unwarranted confidence and the page of life headed with the word Regrets includes shit like “Didn’t ask Melissa to the dance” and “Should have bought that Xbox when it was on sale.”
If a story is about their fuck ups, it’s about them learning – quite quickly! – from those fuck ups. They don’t get to steep in their mistakes the way adults do. A real solid regret needs time to develop. You blow up a good relationship with your own selfishness at seventeen, well, I guess that’s a good lesson. Apply that knowledge to the relationships you have at age eighteen. You do that at age forty, realizing your life is already half over, that you had a hundred chances to change course and took exactly none of them, that you put deep scars on your own soul and on the souls of others…
Well.
That’s a different thing, isn’t it?
Regret and long-suffered guilt and loss are at the core of a lot of my favourite works of fiction.
In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Essun is driven by a series of awful things done to her, and equally awful choices she’s made for her children. Her grappling with her own failures forms a huge part of the story – she has replicated the wrongs done to her, and to save her world, she has to try to make whole things that can never be truly unbroken.
Failure and regret is one of the keys of middle books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga books, particularly the stories of Miles Vorkosigan after the age of thirty.
For those who haven’t read the series (you should!), Mile’s parents are Dashing Space Opera Heroes,** and he wants to be just like them. However, because his mother was poisoned while pregnant with him, Miles has extremely fragile bones, and he’s about five-foot-nothing in boots. He becomes a tremendous hero anyway, fast-talking his way into adventure after adventure, in and out of screw ups and determined to prove himself to a society that holds deep prejudices against anyone with physical disabilities or imperfections.
And then Miles hits thirty, and his confidence and forward momentum finally bring him crashing down, and he can’t quite fix it. He has to be someone else, figure out who he is all over again. Still the guile-master, still moving and thinking faster than his opponents, still improvising madly. But he’s leavened by his failures, he’s matured. He knows how to acknowledge his mistakes in ways his earlier self would have hidden from. It’s one of the great character progressions in SF, and done in a series of novels that are also thrilling and tearjerking and often funny as hell.
Finally, I wanted to talk about a book that deals with regret denied, delayed, and deferred.
Canadian author Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business is a lit-fic novel that’s a favourite of many SF and fantasy readers – a mimetic novel that’s all about maybe-miracles and stage magic and fool-saints. Boy Staunton, Canadian industrialist and millionaire, has died, driving his car at full speed off a dock into the wintry depths of Lake Ontario, and in his mouth the coroner discovers a stone the size of a hen’s egg.
The remembrance that forms the novel’s spine begins at the theatre, where Magnus Eisengrim’s magic show has come to its fortune telling act. A huge prop, a giant bronze-coloured head, answers questions pre-selected from the audience, but someone in the balcony shouts suddenly “Who killed Boy Staunton?”
And the head answers: “He was killed by the usual cabal: By himself, first of all; by the woman he knew; by the woman he did not know; by the man who granted his inmost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.”***
The novel orbits around Boy Staunton, but he is not the protagonist, because Boy, as his name suggests, never really grows up. He becomes rich, he becomes powerful, and he thinks, as many rich and powerful people do, that this justifies his opinions about himself and the world. Those around him, like his childhood friend Dunstan Ramsay – who keeps a particular bit of granite in a desk drawer for almost sixty years – are the ones who have to do the growing.
And then, in the twilight of his life, it all hits Boy. He’s done plenty of things to regret. And when he finally knows what they are, it’s all a bit too much, and the cabal sends him into the black lake waters.
Regret is just one aspect of maturity, of adulthood attained and maintained over years. But it’s one of the cornerstones of a life. You don’t live past adolescence without accumulating regrets, and if you’re lucky, it makes you a better person.
I’m middle aged, and frankly, in terms of personality, I’ve been there for quite a few years. Increasingly, I want books that speak to where I am now – someone who has had some successes, some failures, who has the experience to know that more mistakes lie in my future.
I don’t want to torpedo YA, but I wouldn’t mind a few more books in SFF for the middle aged. Books for people who make a little grunt when they get out of a chair, who enjoy the scratchiness of wool socks, who know exactly how many years are left on the mortgage.
I can enjoy a good coming of age story every now and again, but the stories for those who have long since achieved maturity are what I want right now.
*I have this theory that YA SFF is popular with adults because it has largely supplanted the old-style pulp storytelling, with its (on average) shorter novels with action-oriented plots, which also often featured younger protagonists. But who knows?
**They’re waaaaaay more complicated than that, but that’s young Miles’s opinion.
***This is the best prophecy in literature, I have so decreed it.
Self Promotion Corner
Oh yeah, my story in Analog is out LATER THIS MONTH and, terrible hypocrite that I am, it’s about The Youths! Get The Acheulean Gift while it’s hot! Tell your friends! (Unless you hate it, then bury it under a rock in your back yard and speak of it to no one.)