> Not many novels accessible to pre-adolescents are going to be able to
> say something lasting about the human condition.
The earliest memory of a story/novel that I remember was about a young fellow with a truck who was marginally employed. There was an opportunity to gain work if he could install a dummy axle on his truck, and the story related the misadventures of his effort to raise the money for the axle. The story seems to have said something about the human condition at least from the pov of one writer. The message seems to have changed, or matured over the years, but today, I might say that attempting to be a truck driver, or any kind of independent contractor, can lead you to publish.
Martin