Sex & Shopping for the Young Adult Set

As soon as I began reading Naomi Wolf’s treatise on the Gossip Girl books and their ilk in Sunday’s NYTBR, my heart sank. Partially because I have a total guilty pleasure complex about these books (because I love to laugh at how utterly self-absorbed these teens are and relish how they’ll get a virtual smackdown in college) but also because Wolf’s not exactly shy about expressing any opinion about anything, even if she’s not really saying anything terribly new. And being disturbed by the GG books? Yeah, that’s classic Wolf territory:

The mockery the books direct toward their subjects is not the subversion of adult convention traditionally found in young adult novels. Instead they scorn anyone who is pathetic enough not to fit in. In the “Clique” novels, the “pretty committee,” dominated by the lead bitch-goddess, Massie, is made up of the cool kids of their elite girls school. They terrorize the “losers” below them in the social hierarchy: it’s like “Lord of the Flies” set in the local mall, without the moral revulsion.

The thing is, these books are just an R-rated (or okay, PG-13) version of the Sweet Valley High books I read as a young’un. And while I suspect teens don’t have as highly developed an irony meter as do adults, it isn’t completely absent. But what I find most interesting is what I allude to in the subject header — the fact that essentially, the 80s subgenre of glitz & glamor has been transplanted to the YA crowd. So when do we get SCRUPLES: THE EARLY YEARS?

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