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New Zealand’s Young-Adult Novels
“I could find out more about New Zealand by reading fiction rather than facts in a travel guide”
On my way to LAX, it occurred to me (again) that the young are going to have lives very different from our own. On the airport shuttle was a twenty-something with an English accent and a perky haircut like that of young chef Jamie Oliver. He was accompanied by his French girlfriend and they were on the cell phone asking a friend if they could use his Los Angeles apartment before they flew on to Mexico. While the word “international” still has glamour for me and others my age, for many in the younger generation, global culture doesn’t seem remarkable but simply the way of life–eating sushi, say, while listening to reggae.
On my part, I was on my way to the airport to travel to the Southern Hemisphere where everything is upside-down: where I would spend the longest night of the year while those in California celebrated the longest day; where natives drive on the “other” side of the road; where temperatures were a wintery 8C instead of California’s forest-fire highs of 95F — indeed, where even temperatures are measured in different ways. Clearly, New Zealand required new thinking.
As the poet Wallace Stevens observed, more important than “the look…
