Téa Obreht is the new darling of the literary scene and I want to knife her in the chest. She's sinfully young to have published her first novel at 26 years of age, and lauded daily for her maturity, grace, and superlative new book. Téa just published The Tiger's Wife, and the advance praise is nothing short of retardedly amazing: “[a] spectacular debut novel…[Téa] Obreht spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerizing reader wants her never to stop…Obreht will make headlines as one of the most exciting new writers of her generations, a young artist with the maturity and grace that comes of knowing where one is from, and of honoring those who came before." – Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A.
Publishing a novel is one thing, and to be fresh as a daisy is impressive to boot. I'm just jealous as all hell.
At 22 years of age, I fear I'm over the hill. Let's examine the facts. Our nation's current icons are Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato, and Taylor Swift. Justin Bieber was born in 1994 (gasp! babies were made that recently?) yet he's gone platinum and back for his second album My World. Bieber won Artist of the Year, Favorite Pop/ Rock Male Artist, and Best New Artist. Bieber is killing it—he's now instilling prepubescent lust in the private bits of young girls everywhere with his memoir, yes memoir, entitled Never Say Never. And let's not forget that he posed with Kim Kardashian in the Bahamas in an infamous Vanity Fair spread.
Bieber is in good company. His alleged girlfriend, Demi Lovato, at a tender 19 years of age has partnered with Disney and been to rehab, while cohort Miley Cyrus rides stripper poles, draped in the American flag as she reaps in national accolades and buckets of cash.
The point is that the game is changing. The frontier has expanded, and the cowboys and cowgirls, riding high on horses and frenzied with ambition and reckless thirst for power and fame, can now roam free into the scalding sunset. There are no rules. The wild, youthful, and beautiful are welcome to enter the scene, never too inexperienced. The oldest Jonah bro is 23, Miley Cyrus is 19, and Taylor Swift is 20, yet these young flowers form a heady garland, encircling newspapers, tabloids, and billboards on the regular.
Thanks to democratic technology like youtube and twitter, facebook and myspace, all are artists and exposure comes at no price. Bieber used home-grown means to make a youtube video and the rest is history; he has some of the highest ratings and viewings of any performer in the world. And all he had to do was sit in his living room, strumming a guitar, singing above the din of his abode.
Don't get me wrong: this new credo is kind of amazing. I'm enabled by the world-at-large to do my damn thing, to creatively inspire based on my tenacious, infantile wisdom and off-the-cuff humor.
And who knows: maybe I'll be on The New Yorker's “20 Under 40 Issue” munching on duck fat fries in Brooklyn when the paparazzi storm in.
It could happen.
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wow, I just wrote a whole long comment about Virginia Woolf's theory that it's best to wait til after 30 to publish, and how Jeffrey Eugenides has said he followed that and how Nabokov's first novel (Mary, written in Russian) was a fine, pretty little thing with some interesting commentary about human conditions but nothing of the beauty and intricacies of his later works (Lolita being written when he was in his 50s) and how what of these fine young things that publish these flashy first novels and do they burn out? and how of course they have decades to prove themselves and continue publishing but my general skepticism and then how if only we could all have John Updike's career AND THEN IT GOT ERASED IN A FREAK INTERNET ACCIDENT
ReplyDeletebut now you have the more compressed version of my thoughts. Youth will always be in, but literature still solidly embraces the older guard. Don't worry about publishing in your 20s.
luv, ajb