While not Salinger’s finest work – I’d have Franny and Zooey above it – it is a brilliantly sad and nuanced portrait of a troubled and traumatised, and kind, soul. The story of his striking back against the phonies while meandering around New York is well known. Poor aul Holden, eh? The quintessential sulky teenager who is already bored with life. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesĦ. Although I knew I loved her, I didn’t like anything she said or did.”Ĭalling out the phonies … JD Salinger in 1952. Also, it contains the most accurate description of hormonal love: “Jean clapped her hands like an actress. It is a hilarious story, but what makes it special is how forensic it is on the tiny humiliations of adolescence. Our narrator recounts a trip to the Peninsula, where he and his pals intend to camp for two weeks: a break from cloying mothers, a chance to be manly and search for sunbathing college girls.
Extraordinary Little Cough by Dylan Thomas (1940)Ī story of bigger boys, stolen sweethearts, and the period right before boundless youth gives way to working for a living. Arguably, it is the work that has sparked the last 15-plus years of invigorating Irish writing.ĥ. When I first read Atlantic City, it felt like a door had been booted open. The girls in the corner who will decide if the night is a success or not. The nervy youngsters happy to be near the fun. Characters? Well, we have the boisterous fella whom everyone gravitates around. Nothing eventful happens, but everything of small-town youth is distilled within it. I have never read a book that better portrays the rhythms of flippant conversation between teenage besties: how it bleeds together, how it cruel it can be.Ī pool table, a pinball machine, and young bucks posturing: there’s the whole plot of Atlantic City. Even the plot twist, a sudden treacherous action, is left understated. Following two cynical teenagers, Enid and Rebecca, we witness their pranks and spontaneous adventures, we see lunch dates, we catch glimpses of home and sex life, and that’s it.
This is an odd comic because nothing happens in it and still you can’t help but turn the page. Or better: the pleasure and respite from the dull present matters much more than any fallout. A terrible betrayal, but the sort inevitably made at such an age when the stakes are high, but they don’t feel so. Later, she meets Marcus’s older half-brother, Neil, a doctor and alcoholic, whose invitation to pull the slip on Marcus in his convertible Grace accepts without hesitation. Our protagonist, Grace, is too poor to attend college and is working a summer gig when she meets Marcus. In the case of Passion, there is a wine-coloured convertible. A man making a ketchup sandwich, a young woman dining naked before a man. When I think of Munro’s best stories, an image seizes me before any plot or memorable character. While this whimsical yearning sets the story in motion, the book is most interested in picking at the stifling frustrations of growing up: of being paralysed by the encroaching adult realm of sex and freedom. The plot is simple: a brother is to be married, a wedding is to be attended, and Frankie dreams of joining her brother and his wife on their honeymoon. In McCullers’ novel we meet tomboy Frankie as she experiences the overcooked summer that marks the beginning of her adolescence. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946) Below, I want to suggest 10 other works that explore how the sublime can arise from the dull reality of being a teenager.ġ. As a writer, I’m fascinated by the age between 12 and 20, when your emotions are at their most fraught and melodramatic, when every relationship is the most important relationship, when insecurities rule over reason. In my debut collection of stories, Pure Gold, I have characters that do all of the above.
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