Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 3
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Pascal, Francine. Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011.
Pattee, Amy S. Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel. New York: Routledge, 2011. / Melissa Phruksachart
<1> The Sweet Valley High young adult romance series has unexpectedly returned in the form of a sequel, Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later. Primarily detailing the adventures of sixteen-year old Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, two beautiful, blonde, upper-middle class twin sisters growing up in suburban California, the series has sold over 150 million copies since its inception in 1983. Sweet Valley Confidential follows the sisters past college, to New York and Europe, and through several failed marriages. As was the case in the previous novels, participation in conventional coupledom is the major – if not only – defining element of successful personhood in creator Francine Pascal's world. The book concludes with a fabulous California wedding and a gossip column epilogue which reassures that almost every character has been partnered up. Despite this social conservatism, the specter of infidelity lurks; the novel deconstructs some of its most cherished partnerships in order to suggest that the idealized (but unstable) love depicted in the teen novels cannot hold in adulthood.
<2> Sweet Valley Confidential peaked at #14 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list in April, but this was far from the series' first appearance: according to Amy Pattee's new monograph, Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel, a 1985 Sweet Valley volume titled Perfect Summer became the first young adult novel to become a Times paperback bestseller. The embrace of the sequel by a contemporary audience, chiefly previous readers of the series now in their twenties, thirties, and early forties, suggests just how memorable and powerful young adult reading can be. The timely publication of Pattee's book, the first full-length study of the series, confirms the relevancy of Sweet Valley for popular literature and girls' studies.
<3> Pattee has two primary goals: to contextualize the series' place in the young adult canon and to examine the implications of the series' ideology for its readers. She begins with a historical overview of children's and young adult literature in America, upholding Michael Cart's trajectory of the genre: post-World War II teen fiction was staunchly gendered, formulaic, and chastely heteronormative; the social upheavals of the 1960s began to challenge the legitimacy of those values, exemplified in the “problem novel” which “addressed institutional and social failures and inequalities and refused to pander to the adolescent audience by offering easy answers and happy endings” (13-14); radical changes in the publishing structure of the 1980s ushered in the age of the paperback bestseller not only for adults (Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy) but for children as well. Pattee's attention to the broader mechanics of literary production over individual authors reveals an important aspect of the genre, though more on the origins of the mysterious Francine Pascal would have been welcome. Pattee enlarges Cart's history of 1980s children's publishing, especially in regards to the teen romance; she explains the rise of the mass-produced paperback imprint while tracing how Sweet Valley's publisher, Bantam, capitalized on an increasingly conservative political climate to deliver an instantly successful series to the market.
<4> Like Cart, Pattee argues that the popularity of teen romance was partly informed by a nostalgia for the innocent trappings of the 1950s junior novel. (Both authors find remnants of this nostalgia in the presidential election of 1940s movie star Ronald Reagan.) The fantasy world of Sweet Valley High pointedly “[pacified] readers (and even critics) overwhelmed by the realistic fiction of the 1960s and 1970s” (24). In her second and most interesting chapter, Pattee accounts for the influence of socially conservative Reaganism on the series. 1980s young adult romance novels struggled to find a balance between the realism of the problem novel and the patriarchal fantasy implicit in the romance formula. For the most part, however, Sweet Valley reverted to innocence and idyll invigorated by cliffhanger endings and lurid high drama. Pattee briefly notes that Pascal had written for television soap operas but misses a great opportunity to expose the series' direct formal correlations to shows like Dynasty. Pattee does take up TV again in her examination of the series' central family, the Wakefields, citing Amy Benfer's sharp essay in The Believer magazine. As Benfer notes, contemporaneous television families, namely the Keatons of Family Ties and the Huxtables of The Cosby Show, also featured stable, happy, upper-middle class families with carefree teens and parents working in the stalwarts of respectability, law and medicine, or in the newly trendy fields of architecture, interior design, and television. The particular composition of these families, Pattee argues, worked to congratulate “the traditional American family at a time when its traditional constitution was being questioned” (34).
<5> Pattee also addresses Bantam and Pascal's response to critiques of Sweet Valley's untouched suburbia, uncovering the series' attempts at realism through storylines that fictionalized real-life news stories about teenagers and drugs “in the language associated with the 'moral panic'” of “Reagan's 'war on drugs'” (42). Pattee picks up on fluctuations in the series' attitude towards drugs and alcohol over time, finding an increasingly panicked tone in the novels that mirrored the sentiments circulating in public discourse.
<6> As the title of Pattee's book suggests, it is an adolescent-focused companion to Janice Radway's seminal 1984 study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. In her third chapter, Pattee explores Sweet Valley in the context of romance genre fiction through a close reading of the romance tropes and formulas present in the series. She finds that it does not do very much differently, though its most notable departure is its suggestion of “the temporary nature of romance” (91, emphasis mine). Pattee sees room for subversion here, arguing that “the series offers that the romantic future might be more satisfying than the romantic past or present” (91). This is where the adolescent romance genre reveals itself: instead of the “vicarious adventure” (91) inherent in adult romance fiction, it offers a peek into a rosy future. Because the series seems to easily confirm an uncontested heteronormative worldview, Pattee is concerned with how readers negotiate, and hopefully overcome, these ultimately complicated works. She is deeply invested in the interaction between reader and text, and her fourth (and longest) chapter is devoted to interviewing a cross-section of former readers on why they decided to read the texts, why they abandoned them, and what it is like to remember them as adult women.
<7> Overall, Pattee's most fascinating moments come when she illustrates that the success of Sweet Valley High was “dependent upon distinct literary and cultural circumstances” (29). However, she does not pursue this avenue fully. At the moment, much of the attention on girls' series of the 1980s and 1990s is concerned with its effects on young female readers rather than its social and cultural significance. A comprehensive history of the series still needs to be written, and Pattee's earlier chapters on the logic of the Sweet Valley brand and its conservative political ideology prove there is much to be said. In light of the impressive proliferation of Sweet Valley (several spin-offs, a television show, and a film in the works), it calls for the same thorough treatment that earlier series like Nancy Drew or Gidget (or even later ones such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) have received. Reading the Adolescent Romance demonstrates that the pull of the series is far more than just its attempt at genre.
References
Benfer, Amy. “The Training Bras of Literature.” The Believer 1.9 (Dec. 2003- Jan. 2004): 45-54.
Cart, Michael. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago: American Library Association, 2011.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
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