Meanwhile, he pursues avid detective work into his parents' sex life. Oliver introduces himself like this: 'I recently discovered that my mother had been typing the names of as-yet-uninvented mental conditions into Yahoo's search engine: "delusion syndrome teenage", "over-active imagination problem", "holistic behavioural stabilisers".' He resolves to help his mother toward a diagnosis of Cotard's syndrome, a branch of autism where people believe they are dead, by dropping phrases like: 'My body has been replaced by a shell' and: 'My organs are made of stone' randomly into his conversation. He is, in common with many 15-year-olds, full of tremendous moral self-righteousness about adult failings and in possession of only half the facts.ĭunthorne provides him with a manner that captures exactly his addictive mix of innocence and experience. Oliver Tate is 15, despairingly obsessed with his virginity, in love with his own cleverness, and wildly trying to save his parents' marriage. It is, therefore, remarkable how much genuine life and surprise Joe Dunthorne brings to it in his perfectly pitched debut novel Submarine.ĭunthorne, who is 26, and wrote this book on the creative writing course at East Anglia, transplants The Catcher in the Rye to south Wales, somewhere between Swansea, where he grew up, and Port Talbot.
The voice of the fragile Glass family and Holden Caulfield - damaged, precocious, confessional, self-obsessed, wearing irony against the emptiness of things - persists as about the most influential rhetoric of our lives: you can't imagine Morrissey or MySpace without it. The views and opinions of interviewees are their own, and are not necessarily those of Devolved Voices.It is 60 years since JD Salinger invented teenage anxiety. A pamphlet of his poems was published by Faber and Faber ( Faber New Poets 5).įaber New Poets 5(Faber and Faber, 2010) ISBN 9780571249992
His debut novel, Submarine (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin), was adapted for film by Richard Ayoade and his second, Wild Abandon(Hamish Hamilton/Penguin), won the Society of Authors’ Encore Award. Joe Dunthorne grew up in Swansea and now lives in London.
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