From One Dork to Another

From One Dork to Another

Frank Portman on Young Adult fiction, Holden Caulfield, and high school.

When you’re a novelist in the burgeoning Young Adult literature category with a series about a young man with a bone to pick with everyone and every thing, comparisons to the original adolescent malcontent of American literature, Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye, are to be expected. The difference with Oakland’s Frank Portman, author of King Dork and the recent sequel King Dork Approximately (Delacorte Press), is that Portman welcomes the comparison. He even has King Dork, aka 10th-grader Tom Henderson, rail in the book against what he calls “the Catcher Cult” of adults who foist J.D. Salinger’s masterwork on them. Portman’s prose takes readers back to those insecure and often hilarious high school days. I caught up recently with the man perhaps better known as “Dr. Frank” from his days leading the still-performing pop-punk rockers “The Mr. T Experience” and was reminded that the insecurities of high school can—and do—live on well into adulthood.

Paul Kilduff: Who is the YA audience?

Frank Portman: There’s different ways to look at it. It says on the cover “14 and older,” so you could take it that way. I mean Young Adult is a marketing category, and people have been paying a lot of attention to it lately, because it’s been very successful. It does several things at once. It certainly is meant to present material for a target audience of teenagers in the high school years and maybe a little beyond. But, as has been written about endlessly by people either celebrating or criticizing it, there are a lot of adults who read these books. I think in a way, it’s a wider net than, say, an adult book or literary fiction.

PK: King Dork Approximately has been compared to The Catcher in the Rye. Had this marketing category existed then, would it have been marketed as YA?

FP: It would’ve been appropriate for it to be. There are some books about teenagers that are published as adult books. Probably the quintessential teen novel of the last 20 years, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, was published by MTV Books. That’s an adult book. That is so, you know, in this category. And once you sort of start to dissect them and examine these things, you can get obsessed with them, and they can drive you nuts. But when you’re writing books, you write them and then hope that your publisher figures out a way for somebody to buy them. And that is the extent of the meaningful involvement that the author can have in the marketing per se. I don’t even understand how they do it, but I see why they do it, because it is a big audience. I’m talking about teenagers who read books and like to buy books, and physical books as well.

PK: I’m 53. If somebody saw me at Starbucks hunkered down with King Dork Approximately, they might look askance. Like, can’t you find something more age-appropriate to read? Don’t plenty of adults shy away from YA books?

FP: If you take a step back, what this conversation is really getting at is a more general issue, which is that we’re still trying to figure out what an adult is. “I’m an adult; what should I be thinking about?” All these things are not settled. You might make the case that they’re more up in the air than ever. That’s the meat of many of these coming-of-age novels. Every now and again someone will publish an article in some place like the Washington Post bitterly denouncing adults who read teen fiction. A lot of people in my racket take these very personally and get very upset by them. But to me, it just dramatizes the same stuff that we’re writing about. What is your standard of what your aesthetic is, what you’re supposed to be interested in, what you’re supposed to care about, and what’s supposed to move you, and why are you searching for that? These are pretty fundamental questions about what it is to be a person in society.

PK: Do we all just peak in the 10th grade?

FP: The way I would put it is that you have these fundamental, very important experiences in your life during adolescence. And that’s significant. But then there are things that keep happening over and over and over again through the rest of your life. And the dynamic changes a lot less than we like to think sometimes.

PK: I hate to admit this, but I’m still grappling with things that happened to me in high school.

FP: For sure, and how many times have you found yourself in a difficult social situation with back-biting and weird trivial politics and so forth and just thought, “This is so high school?” That never ends. High school never ends.

PK: Getting back to Catcher, if Tom Henderson hates Holden Caulfield so much, isn’t he in danger of becoming just like him?

FP: That’s an irony. I mean, people will point this out. They’ll say, “Well, he talks about how much he hates Holden Caulfield so much.” That’s some great detective work there. I mean, we don’t always realize the effect of our affectations when somebody observes them from the outside.

PK: So it was intentional?

FP: It was. I thought this guy, Tom Henderson, was going to be compared to Holden Caulfield. So I wanted to meet that head-on. And there’s all sorts of irony in doing that.

PK: Sounds like it’s an occupational hazard for writers of stories about disaffected young men to have the Holden Caulfield comparison made. And then you have the audacity to keep bringing that up. Pretty meta.

FP: That’s the fun part.

PK: Maybe you should have a kid—that way you’ll never run out of material.

FP: Yeah, that’s what they all say. The thing is, having devoted so much time and thought to these matters does not in any way mitigate what I would imagine is the sheer terror of having offspring of your own.

__________

For more Kilduff, visit the “Kilduff File Super Fan Page” on Facebook.


Frank Portman Vital Stats

Age: 50

Birthplace: San Francisco

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Book On Nightstand: “When you’re a professional writer, reading for fun all but stops.”

Motto: Semper Ubi Sub Ubi (Always Wear Underwear)

Website: www.FrankPortman.com

Faces of the East Bay