I hate smart kids

Serious novelists write about life. Often, and not always intentionally, life contains kids. So sometimes serious novelists write about kids.

And when they do, s/he’s bound to be a genius, more likely quoting Milton in Manhattan than snogging Billy behind the bike-sheds.

Consider:

• Swamplandia — teenage, home-schooled boy dreams of Harvard and quotes Keats to his co-workers.

• The Marriage Plot — main character, Madeleine, is introduced by means of her library. She attends Brown University and is writing her senior thesis on the marriage plot.

• Sense of an Ending — main character attends Bristol University, a friend and girlfriend go to Cambridge.

• The Art of Fielding — all main characters possess exceptional ability of some form. Henry is, initially, red-hot pitcher. Owen is as likely to drop a line from the canon as he is unlikely to drop a baseball. Pella attends their college after dropping out of Harvard.

Last year, I had to give up reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, because, however tremendously executed it was, I couldn’t be bothered with the portrayal of a teenager who was as comfortable taking drugs as attending edgy punk clubs as travelling miles and miles to fuck older men. In comparison, Harry Potter’s childhood seems more grounded.

And, regardless of third/first person perspective, the precocious narrative voice will always contain both delicate insight and remarkable poetry. Evidently, the US school system produces children with full understanding of figurative language, for one thing.

‘So what?’ you cry from behind your Ivy League master’s degrees. In isolation, a story about an exceptional character in exceptional circumstances makes for a fun read. But, what with the Booker nomination of How to be Both featuring a teenager who uses her iPad (“a holy votive tablet”) to watch pornography, described as “frieze after frieze of lifelike scenes of carnal pleasure-house love enacted before our eyes.”, I think such a character has turned cliché. We’ve reached peak precocity.

I’m sure there are a couple of teenagers in the UK/US who’d use such language as quoted above, but why must their archetype always appear in adult fiction? Have serious writers never met a child? Have they never been to a cinema and experienced that popcorn snapchat hell?

What ever happened to mediocrity? I’d love to read a book about a kid who thought Kierkegaard was Arsenal’s reserve goalkeeper. Am I the only one to have experienced a college life in which I seldom approached top marks in essays, where I was nervous to smoke dope, where sex was something you had if you were particularly lucky or drunken?

Or am I reading the wrong books? Am I as unlucky as I am middling?

Or do these characters need to be in a position of privilege to make their tragic falls all the more affecting?

Or is literary fiction a means by which highly educated writers justify their college fees/knowledge of Romantic poets?

(Note to authors — we read your Wikipedia entries and bio details on the inside flap — assume we know of your awesome educational background.)

Do we, the dull mass of the mediocre, get off on this in the same way that housewives with frustrated sex lives lap up Fifty Shades? (Unfair.) I don’t know. Maybe I’m not smart enough to ever know.

But! Here! No! I do know that I’d like to read a campus novel, or even a novel with a teenage protagonist, whose characters are neither failures nor winners. Where they’re normal. Like the majority of us. Imagine that. The crushing truth of the humdrum, the tyranny of the everyday. Me. You. A soggy sandwich.

My wife, because she likes to keep me happy and quiet, gave me a copy of Zadie Smith’s novel, NW. I thought it looked interesting. I read in The Guardian that it traces the lives of three second-generation immigrants who’d made it from a London council estate to university. Oh. University. And not any universities, either. Protagonist Leah studied Philosophy at Edinburgh. The university’s website lists a typical undergraduate entry offer as ‘AAA’, ‘to applicants who have achieved a strong set of GCSE A* grades’. Bugger. That’s pretty exceptional. I wouldn’t have made it in.

I won’t read NW, (although I admired On Beauty, set in a New England university town outside of Boston … wait a second …). I want exceptional events happening to unexceptional characters. Not the other way around. Life measured through a series of tiny victories.