Reads Like Teen Spirit

Charlie has issues. His favorite aunt passed away, and his best friend just committed suicide. The girl he loves wants him as a friend; a girl he does not love wants him as a lover. His 18-year-old sister is pregnant. The LSD he took is not sitting well. And he has a math quiz looming. Charlie is the high school freshman protagonist of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, a 29-year-old screenwriter. Published by MTV, it is one of a new generation of novels geared toward teenagers, for whom such subjects are increasingly just part of growing up.

Young-adult novels, as the genre used to be called, still center on disenfranchised adolescents who could be direct descendants of Holden Caulfield. Now, though, says Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher of Front Street Books, "the heat has been turned up." Front Street helped bring so-called bleak books to early teens in 1997 when it published one book set in a juvenile-detention facility (Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree) and another in which a 13-year-old sleeps with her mother's boss (Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves). They were followed by Melvin Burgess's even more graphic Smack, a British novel imported by Henry Holt, which details a middle-class 15-year-old's descent into the world of heroin addiction and prostitution.

These books and others that feature stark themes, complex plot lines and ambiguous resolutions are edging out the happy endings and conventional morals of the old-style teen "problem" novels, which would obsess over something like a divorce, or an accidental pregnancy, for 120 pages. "The formula has been broken," says Eliza Dresang, author of Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age.

Now in its fourth printing, The Perks of Being a Wallflower has developed a cult following since it was released in February. "It reminded me of me and my friends, totally and completely," a teen reader reported on an AOL message board. Said another: "I don't read books by choice too often, but I really loved this one."

Book merchants and publishers love it too. has designated a special area for teens online; chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble have begun to do the same in their stores (hint: look for teen racks near the coffee bar). To make the books more attractive to young people, publishers are printing them in larger sizes and illustrating their covers with bold colors and stylish graphics. They're also promoting the books on TV shows and in magazines that are popular with youngsters, as well as on websites.

Teen fiction may, in fact, be the first literary genre born of the Internet. Its fast-paced narratives draw upon the target demographic's kinship with MTV, which has a joint venture with Pocket Books, and with the Internet and kids' ease in processing information in unconventional formats. Smack is told by multiple narrators. Monster, the latest novel by veteran children's book author Walter Dean Myers, is recounted in the form of a screenplay. Louis Sachar's Holes, last year's Newbery and National Book Award winner about a boy erroneously sent to a juvenile detention center, shuttles between past and present.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is presented as a collection of letters the narrator has written to an unspecified recipient. Nearing the end of his freshman year, Charlie realizes what he likes about a certain book, and his description serves to explain the appeal of his own narrative: "It wasn't like you had to really search for the philosophy. It was pretty straightforward, I thought, and the great part is that I took what the author wrote about and put it in terms of my own life."

Teen books may not be able to compete with the visuals of The Matrix, but they do provide a few hours of what teens may need most: time to think. And there's nothing bleak about that.