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Book reviews |
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CATCH-CRIES OF THE WRYLast updated: 26 May 1997
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Reviews |
Review by Giles Hugo IT'S 43 years since J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye started it's almost unchallengeable reign as the definitive American teen coming-of-age novel. Yet every couple of years another ambitious young writer attempts to out-'Catcher' Salinger - and mostly they fail miserably, though sometimes with some honour. I have been re-reading Catcher every couple of years since 1967 - with undiminished enjoyment - and while Salinger's crown shines ever brighter with every examination, the pretenders to the throne grow ever more presumptuous. So, when a publisher blurbs a debut novel as a 'Catcher in the Rye for the Grunge generation, this instant classic...', my sceptometer hits redline. It's like saying a 'Huckleberry Finn for the New Age'. Some classics - and Salinger surely qualifies - are best left unimitated, or seriously comparisoned by glib blurb writers. However, I have to admit Blake Nelson's Girl gets much closer to the mark than almost all former claimants. For starters it's first-person subject, Andrea Marr, is extremely funny and sad - often simultaneously. This seeming contradiction echoes Holden Caulfield's bitter-sweet dwelling on the heinous crimes of the hordes of phoneys who both anger and depress him. Nelson's strength is in his ability to speak directly from within the troubled being of a young girl whose angst and awakening we share from just before her 16th birthday to her departure for college. From the moment that best friend Cybil shaves her head to impress emergent rock star Todd Sparrow, Andrea starts drifting away from the safe but terminally boring mall milieu to the intriguing but unsettling attractions of the alternative rock scene - 'I was here and it was dark and the people were scary and weird and way too cool.' Indeed, it is coolth that is the reference point for identification, status and self-esteem. Remember? Yes, of course we do, having grown up in earlier coolth-conscious decades - be it the '50s, '60s, '70s or '80s - and it is easy to share the rollercoaster plunge and swoop of Andrea's emotions. Choice of friends, clothes and music determine how cool you are - superficially, but for Andrea and her mates the Big Questions are about love, sex and drugs. Almost 16 and still a virgin, she muses: 'I knew he was on this schedule in his mind and pretty soon he would want sex. And I didn't really dislike him and I wouldn't even mind that much if he was the first one because Cybil and Richard were doing it and Rebecca Farnhurst had done it and Wendy Simpson did it with a boy from Bradley Day School when she was drunk. So Mark would be okay. It was inevitable anyway. And it didn't seem like you were really part of things until you did it because that's what everything was about, like jokes and TV, and even the ends of extension cords were either male or female and when you plugged them together, what was that?' Despite much groping and angst, her first lover is not one of her dates or school mates, but a country boy, a fellow menial at a summer camp where Andrea is sent to work to get her out of her parents' hair. Although it starts out as just a vacation fling, away from the critical eyes of her friends and rivals, the joys of intimacy are so intense that the inevitable parting is more emotionally painful than anticipated. His goodbye gift to her is a bullet, filched from his mother's boyfriend's gun. She arrives back home, '...thinking how incredibly stupid I was if I expected life to be anything else but failed love and mindless sex and crying all night in bus stations.' Apart from the fact that Nelson's tale ends at a sort of 'here comes a sequel' point - perhaps Andrea Goes to College, her odd- essey is convincingly told, the sort of tale that both today's teenagers and their parents can enjoy - it might even give them something to talk about together. by Giles Hugo
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