"The Catcher in the Rye" by J D Salinger

This is the classic novel of teenage discontent although to my mind the scenes set in the prep school are not as brilliant as James Kirkwood's Good Times, Bad Times and the 'brother killed himself' theme is explored in far more depth in Judith Guest's Ordinary People. But this is comparing it with two magnificent books. I only wonder why this book is the cult, the yardstick, while they both became also-rans.

The hero, Holden Caulfield, is extraordinarily privileged for a teenager; he has freedoms most teenagers could only dream of. Not only does he go to a succession of top private schools, but also his brother is a Hollywood scriptwriter, he lives in Manhattan, he can smoke both at home and at school, he has rich parents who clearly love him and look after him, he can leave his boarding school at will to travel into New York to party and to meet girls, and he has the confidence to wander into nightclubs and bars, to book into hotels, and even to ask waiters to invite singers to his table. Is he really a typical American youth facing an emotional crisis?

Plot Spoiler alert; this section has spoilers (although “I’d tell you the rest of the story, but I might puke if I did. It isn’t that I’d spoil it for you or anything. There isn’t anything to spoil, for Chrissake.” ,p 125)

The plot seems to divide into four sections; like Acts; each Act is almost exactly one quarter of the book. The first act recounts Holden at prep school. The second act follows him to New York where he takes a hotel room and goes to a night club. He tries to pick up some girls but in the end he has a hooker come to his room. This act finishes with him being beaten up by the hooker's pimp for an extra five dollars. If this is Holden's descent into hell, he descends a long way. But in Act Three he leaves his hotel and starts to roam around New York. He persuades a girl friend to watch the movies with him; he insults her and she leaves. He persuades an old friend to have a drink with him; again Holden's behaviour sends the lad away. Holden is now drunk and lonely. He decides to go to see his sister. In Act Four he sees his sister than he goes to the house of an old teacher to sleep the night but he becomes afraid that the teacher wants to sleep with him and so he ends up sleeping in a station waiting room. He is homeless and getting ill.

Style
Breaks the rules. He uses a lot of repetition. No kidding. A lot. And italics. Uses the phrase “It really does” a lot. Especially (?) when he is lying.

He uses the word “old “ to describe people.

He uses a lot of exaggeration, such as the phrase “it killed me” to mean it tickled me pink.

David Lodge in "The Art of Fiction" (chapter 4; Teenage skaz") says: “It's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive, and largely made up of trivial events ... The language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished.”

What's it all about?

• Holden, the kid who hates phonys, is the biggest phony of them all. He's a spoiled rich kid who thinks he can use his money to buy people, like a prostitute, or old the girls from Seattle, or his friend old Luce; he gives them money and presents and he buys them drinks but he can't buy their love. The only love he gets is from Phoebe his sister; he buys her a record but he breaks it before she gets it. 
• Holden, the kid who hates phonys, who is "the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life".
• Holden, the virgin who is desperate to get laid, who can't take advantage of the young prostitute, who gets into a fight defending the honour of a girl he has never slept with.
• Holden the naive innocent, who gets beaten up by a pimp and nearly seduced by his teacher.
• Holden, the spolied brat with the unrealistic dreams of escaping to the countryside to chop wood and pump gas.
• Holden, the adolescent who misses his dead brother, who can't study at school, who enters the hell of New York and descends into his own private hell of depression and loneliness, ending up sleeping in the station.
• Contradictions abound. Even his dream of being a 'catcher' in the rye is based on his mishearing a song about meeting someone in the rye.

Selected quotes:

• “Then this girl gets killed, because she's always speeding. That story just about killed me.” (p 16)
• Holden is very concerned with not being a ‘phony’; he hates phonys. “Grand. There's a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.” (p 8)
• “They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey. It has a very good academic rating, Pencey. It really does.” (p 3)
• “ almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.” (p 46)
• “Mothers are all slightly insane.” (p 49)
• “He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you.” (p 79)
• “Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while he was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.” (p 89)
• “My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I’m necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn’t a goddam thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway.” (p 95)
• “Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.” (p 102)
• “I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.” (p 105)
• “A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.” (p 117)
• “All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.” (p 142)
• “Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” (p 192)

Great book (though there are better narratives of teenage angst); September 2017; 192 pages

This book was rated 72nd by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923).

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tehanu" by Ursula Le Guin

This is the fourth of the Earthsea books about a fantasy archipelago where wizards rule over an idyllically rural people and dragons still fly. The three previous books have been:

• A Wizard of Earthsea which introduces Sparrowhawk, a young lad who trains to be a wizard and battles death
• The Tombs of Atuan which introduces Tenar, a young girl in training to be a priestess of a silent world underground
• The Farthest Shore in which an old Sparrowhawk and a young prince voyage to the end of the world to find out what is causing wizards to forget their magic

Tenar, now a widow living on Gont, has taken under her wing a child, Therru, who was raped and burned by her father. They hear that wizard Ogion is dying and go to him. Then Sparrowhawk flies in on a dragon. But he has lost his magic. Evil forces chase Tenar and Therru and Ged seems powerless to help.

A strange story that feels a little like the tying up of lost ends. There are still some beautiful and remarkable phrases:

• "The little ruined butterfly came shivering from her cocoon" (p 646)
• "There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done." (p 682)
• "There seemed always a great deal to be learned." (p 691)
• "A good deal of her obscurity and cant ... was a mere ineptness with words and ideas." (p 692)
• "Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never!" (p 694)
• "to drive the cart without the ox." (p 744)
• "Nine of us wet ... and one of us happy." (p 796)
• "a den of infamy and chickens" (p 818)
• "to spin thread with the whirlwind" (p 819)

April 2017; 251 pages

"Mockingjay: Hunger Games 3" by Suzanne Collins

Less would have been more.

Katniss has been evacuated to District 13 after her home district, 12, has been annihilated by the Capital's fire bombers. Her role is to lead the revolution that is now engulfing almost all the districts. Peeta, her alleged husband, is being tortured in the Capitol; he appears on television asking for a ceasefire; he seems to have sold out to President Snow.

So this is war and Katniss is training to be a soldier with her friend Gale. Bit not just any soldier. She is the face of the rebellion and, in her Mockingjay clothes, she is regularly televised as she visits hospitals and fights.

Of course this is where loose ends get tied up. The Roman basis for the dystopia is made explicit when it is revealed that the country's name, Panem, derives from panem et circenses, the Latin for 'bread and circuses', which some cynical Roman suggested was the way to keep a populace subdued. Hence, the Hunger Games.

From time to time she thinks about the moral implications of what she is doing. In the middle of the book there is a moment when she and her rebels are attacking District Two where the Capitol's military complex is concealed within a mountain and they decide to cause avalanches to block all exits and entrances except for one and then be ready to kill the people when they flee. This is hard for a miner's child to do. So she tries to stop the rebels shooting the refugees but finds herself looking down a gun barrel. He asks her to give him one reason why he shouldn't shoot her and she tells him that she can't. She asks him to shoot; she tells him she is done with killing the Capitol's slaves.
"I'm not their slave," the man mutters.
"I am," I say. "That's why I killed Cato ... and he killed Thresh ... and he killed Clove ... and she tried to kill me. It just goes around and around, and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol. But I'm tired of being a piece in their Games."

And that should be the turning point, the point where the plot reverses, the crisis, the perepiteia. We've had hatred and killing; the Peacekeepers kill the rebels and the rebels kills the Peacekeepers and it goes on and on in an endless cycle of violence and this is the point where the protagonist, Katniss, recognises that this is wrong and finds a new way to resolve all the differences. And there will setbacks along that road and we won't know if she will succeed until the very end but that is what should happen. That is what stories do. But this one doesn't.

It sounds like I am being pious. I don't believe that a story must have a moral point. Most stories do. In comedies good triumphs in the end, in tragedies evil is punished in the end. Even in Romeo and Juliet, where the title characters are killed, the lovers do after all end up together (but dead) and the Montagues and Capulets are reconciled, so it has a sort of happy ending. This is how stories work.

Modern fiction has allowed the author to ditch the conventions. I would never want to wind the clock back and say that an author cannot. But the story form has a psychological power, or it caters to a psychological need, that means that breaking out of the form must be done carefully. It is like free verse. Rhyme and scansion allow many people to create enjoyable poetry but it is really difficult to write good poems if there are no rules to follow.

Throughout the book, as throughout the last two books, Katniss faces moral dilemmas. She spots them and debates them. Who is telling her the truth? Is she being manipulated by the rebels? Why is is OK to kill in some circumstances and not others? She has nightmares about the terrible things she has done. She feels guilty about Peeta, rescued but a psychological wreck. She realises that the war is brutalising Gale. She even questions whether it is right for her to jeopardise other people's lives in her monomaniacal pursuit of her mission to kill the President of the Capitol. But she keeps right on. She kills and watches people die.

And in the end, we too are brutalised. The author seems to have continued the series only so that she can dream up ever more ghoulish ways to kills off her major characters. It is a bloodbath. And I stopped caring.

Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps I was supposed to end up like Katniss, a cold hearted, unfeeling killer. Unfortunately, I stopped caring about Katniss too. Perhaps that was the point, to show she wouldn't even care for herself. But I don't think it made good fiction.

It was just a very violent video game.

There is, of course, a twist in the end, but I had become numb by then.

April 2014; 436 pages

Read my reviews of the far better Hunger Games 1 and Catching Fire (HG2).

"Catching Fire: Hunger Games 2" by Suzanne Collins

Ironically, this took a little longer to catch fire than HG 1. Katniss and Peeta are back in District 12 but Preseident Snow is angry that Katniss defied the Hunger Games and fears that she could be the spark that sets alight the rebellion. She has to maintain the pretence that she is madly in love with Peeta, to the point of arranging their marriage, despite the obviously jealousy of boy-back-home Gale.

There is a reflection on the jabberjays, birds who were bred to listen to what people said and then to fly home and repeat the words, birds bred to be spies, surveillance devices. But people cottoned on and began to lie to the birds and the Capital released them into the wild, assuming that highly bred birds would die out there. But they didn't. They interbred with other birds to create the Mockingjay. The Capital "hadn't anticipated its will to live" (p 105). The mockingjay becomes a symbol of the simmering revolution.

And this is what makes this saga leap above other thrillers. It is actually about relationships and moral choices. After Gale has been flogged for poaching and is unconscious, Katniss touches his face the "parts of him I have never had cause to touch before": his eyebrows, his stubble, his throat, his lips. She imagines how she would feel had he been the one who had won the Games by pretending to be in love with a fellow tribute. She hates him. Then the girl who has been so immensely brave in the arena thinks (p 134)
Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?
Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die. This is the girl who Gale met in the woods today. 
No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.
This is morality. This is what makes HG good.

But rebellion is brewing and Katniss has become a symbol of it. So when she and Peeta are forced back into the arena for the 75th games she is now determine to protect him and he is determined to protect her. But there are others who also seem determined to protect them, even at the risk of their own lives.

Another excellent book made special by the issues of trust, brought even more to the fore in a rebellion when strangers will die for you but friedns might betray you.

April 2016; 439 pages

Hunger Games 1 is a well written thriller for young people.
But Mockingjay (HG3) fails to keep the human and moral issues going and degenerates into a shoot 'em up

"The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins

It is always a good sign when you read a book in just over a day. This book is extremely easy to read and Collins keeps the tension going almost throughout.

The author says that the idea for the book came as she was switching backwards and forwards between reality TV in which young people were competing for prizes and a documentary programme about a war, showing young people fighting. In the Hunger Games, twelve teenage girls and twelve teenage boys are released into a controlled environment and required to slaughter one another until there is only one left. This is televised.

It is set in a dystopian future. Unusually for so many books like this, the back story is told lightly and the details are allowed to percolate out throughout the narrative. The US has been replaced by a capital and twelve outlying districts; there used to be thirteen but one rebelled and were exterminated, shades of the twelve tribes of Israel and the annihilation of the tribe of Benjamin. But there are far more echoes of Ancient Rome: for example, the stylist who prepares Katniss for the television appearances before the games (including a procession in a chariot) is called Cinna. Each district is organised around a particular service, thus one district is Agriculture and district twelve, from which the heroine, Katniss, comes, is mining. She herself doesn't mine, her dad did and died in an explosion; Katniss hunts (illegally) with a boy called Gale. At the annual Reaping the names of all the teenagers in the district are put into a hat and one girl and one boy are drawn at random to represent the district in the Hunger Games. The name of Prim, twelve year old sister of Katniss is drawn, and Katniss volunteers to take her place.

She and her fellow tribute, Peeta the baker's son, travel to the Capital where they are interviewed and prepared for the Games. During the interviews Katniss discovers that Peeta is in love with her. But is this just a strategy? Is he attempting to lull her into a false sense of security so that he can kill her? Remember: only one will survive. But the theme of the star-crossed lovers plays so well on television that Katniss is persuaded to play along with it (although she worries what Gale might think). After all, during the early stages of the games tributes often form alliances to eliminate the opposition before, inevitably, having to fight among themselves.

What is about this book that has made it so successful? Clearly the idea of crossing a TV gameshow with war was a brilliant idea but gladitorial contests to the death in a dystopian future is not exactly new.

The story itself is well told. In chapter one (23 pages) we establish that Katniss is an expert hunter and that she (intriguingly, it is not until page 11 that we can be certain that Katniss is a girl) has a very good friend called Gale. Her father is dead and she had to look after herself and her little sister as well as her motherwhen her mother was distraught with grief. At the end of the chapter, Prim is chosen for the Games. All the chapters end of great cliff-hangers, encouraging you to read on straight away. In chapter two, Peeta is chosen and we are immediately into conflicting emotions: Katniss is grateful to Peeta because he kept her alive when she was starving but she knows she might be forced to kill him (and he will try to kill her). The games themselves don't start until page 172 and on page 187 we discover that Peeta has allied himself with a group of strong tributes.

There is, of course, twists and turns throughout the story and some lovely twists near the end. The final page, even the last sentence, is all about the emotions, preparing for the sequel.

The tension of a Games where the protagonist is hunting and being hunted is well told and keeps you reading. But what makes this book special is the emotional side of it all. Can Katniss trust Peeta? He claims he loves her, does she love him? Is his love, as she initially suspects, just a way of lulling her into a false sense of security? Does she actually (although she certainly wouldn't acknowledge it) love Gale, the boy left back home? And what Peeta actually does when they are in the arena make the reader ask the same questions: what game is he actually playing? And what will happen in the end when only one player can survive? Star-crossed lovers indeed.

Katniss is a wonderful personality. She is incredibly protective of her little sister Prim but she also has a lot of anger inside her. She is angry with her mother for failing to look after Prim and her when her father died. She is angry with the system. She doesn't like feeling obliged to people. She hates being put on show. She is afraid of being killed but she also feels guilty when she kills. She is wonderfully teenage in every way: surly and sullen, oscillating between loving beautiful clothes and wanting to run off into the woods and get dirty, hating and caring, wanting to love and to be loved but scared of trusting.

The other characters are nicely drawn but we only ever see them through the eyes of Katniss (and she doesn't like many people!)

The writing is good with sentences averaging about ten words but with a nice variety of length; the paragraphs are also mostly short but varied.

Fun to read. April 2016; 436 pages

Here is my review of the sequel: Catching Fire and of the third book in the trilogy: Mockingjay

This is a great book as a really well-written teenage thriller but for raw young adult emotion I would recommend The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and for the world's funniest teenage road trip Paper Towns, also by John Green

Vernon God Little is another novel which has a reality TV element to it (when Vernon's trial is televised) although it is set in a modern America. Vernon's friends and neighbours are hideous but instantly recognisably comic grotesques and the writing is  alittle more literay than The Hunger Games.

"The fault in our stars" by John Green

Sixteen-year-old Hazel has terminal cancer. She meets hot-bodied Augustus (17) at the local support group. He is in remission having lost a leg. Together they read a book about a a young child having cancer; the book ends mid-sentence and, desperate to know what happened to the other characters they get in touch with the author, who lives in Amsterdam. As they fall in love, disease, and plot twists threaten their happiness.

Hazel writes with vicious humour about the world of teenage cancer sufferers and the ways that other people who are going to live try to make mortality bearable. Isaac beats cancer by sacrificing his eyes; his girlfriend dumps him before the operation because you can't dump a blind boy. Caroline died of brain cancer which made her really nasty towards the end. From Cancer Perks (the little benefits you get when people feel sorry for you) to wetting the bed, from not daring to fall in love in case your death destroys the one you love to climbing the stairs when you lungs are filling with fluid, this book is exceptional.

As in Paper Towns, Green's portrayal of challenged, intelligent, wise-beyond-their-years teenagers is exceptional. Hazel's humour in the face of adversity (or as she might put it: Humour. In. The. Face. Of. Adversity.) is matched only by that of Augustus. When they want to travel to Amsterdam they seek funding from the Wish Genies but Hazel has already used her wish when she was 13. "What'd you do?" asks Augustus. "I sighed loudly. 'I was thirteen,' I said. 'Not Disney,' he said. I said nothing. 'You did not go to Disney World'. I said nothing. 'Hazel GRACE,' he shouted. 'You did not use your one dying Wish to go to Disney World with your parents.' 'Also Epcott Center,' I mumbled. 'Oh my God,' Augustus said. 'I can't believe I have a crush on a girl with such cliche wishes.' 'I was thirteen,' I said again, although of course I was only thinking crush crush crush crush crush."

But there are many harder moments. When she meets Isaac for the first time after his eye operation she tells him 'I have gotten really hot since you went blind.' There is the moment when she mentions that having cancer is a side effect of the mutation that caused evolution; her tragedy, her existence, is nothing more than a side effect. When they finally meet the famous author (who is horrible to them) he asks Augustus: "'Did you close the deal with that chick yet?' Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless Augustus Waters. 'I,' he started, 'um, I, Hazel, um. Well.'" But, to start with at least, she can't kiss him because she is frightened he will care about her too much and be hurt when she dies; she compares her death to a grenade going off that will hurt a lot of people.

As well as the enormously attractive characters, there is a lot of reality. Her lungs filling with fluid make it hard for her to climb stairs, sometimes even eating is exhausting. He finds it difficult to get into the back seat of a car because of his prosthesis. She carts an oxygen tank with her everywhere. And her mum is doing a course in social work so she will be able to have a meaning to life after Hazel dies but she doesn't tell Hazel because how can you tell your child that you are thinking about your life after their death?

This book has everything: gritty reality, soaring romance, and a pulsating vitality injected with eternal humour even in the moments of greatest darkness. October 2015; 313 pages

John Green has also written  An Abundance of Katherines and Turtles All the Way Down; these are not nearly as dark but both take the reality of teenage life and add oddbnall characters and wise-cracks to make a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience.
Another dark US teen novel is Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

"Paper Towns" by John Green

This is a teen novel set in the US. The hero, Q, is in his last year of high school. One night his next door neighbour, Margo Roth Spiegelman, whom he adores from afar, takes him for a whirlwind all-nighter of revenge on her boyfriend who is cheating with her best friend. The next day she has disappeared. Q, with his nerdy friends Radar, obsessed with editing Onmictionary, and Ben, obsessed with losing his virginity, have to solve the clues that Margo has left to find her, or her dead body.

This book has an unusual structure. After a prologue of a few pages when 9-year-olds Q and Margo find a dead guy in the local park, there are 13 pages of setting the scene and introducing the characters during a day at school followed by the revenge night which continues for about 60 pages. We are now a quarter of the way through the book and we have been having fun, even though very little has actually happened. Then Margo disappears although no one really worries about that for another 15 pages. Then the clue hunt starts and goes on for another 36 pages before a clue is found which can move the narrative on and we are now nearly half way through. But the last clue points to a deserted minimall at Q is convinced that all the clues are a way of Margo telling him where to find her dead body after she has committed suicide and so the three friends break into the derelict minimall. At this point I was so excited I had to keep my eyes firmly on the left hand page because I wanted but dreaded what might be written on the right hand page. This was as exciting as the middle of the brilliant Room and again it was more or less bang in the centre of the book. But then we enter a phase where nothing much happens again. We have a very funny bit where Ben gets very drunk at the prom party and Q goes off him a bit but they plan to go to graduation naked underneath their gowns.  But the flatness extends for nearly a quarter of the book before Q finds the vital clue and he and his mates have to drive for twenty four hours in a camper van. The road trip is brilliant. There are some very funny moments and some moments of tension but there is very little contribution to the actual plot. Then comes the final ten per cent of the book which brings the bitter end.

So much for the plot. In many ways it was a stop start sort of book. There was enough to keep me going when the momentum flagged slightly. But it was episodic. The night of revenge did not seem to link up particularly well with 'Where's Margo' theme and the wonderful road trip was, in many ways, a separate event.

The characterisation was neatly done. They were introduced quickly and given more depth as and when they needed it. They had interesting story curves although they were rather dropped at the end of the book when they had served their usefulness.

There was plenty of humour. The way that it alternated with the tension was very clever. The three nerds, Q, Radar and Ben, laughed and joked like three really good mates, even though Q seemed to be the permanent outsider. There are some brilliant wisecracks:

• "It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history but is sure isn't big."
• When his therapist parents give Q a key for a new car and he goes outside and finds that it is a minivan just like his mum's and he is so disappointed that he thinks 'these people specialise in the analysis and understanding of the human psyche.'
• After Q and Radar have restrained Ben who has attacked someone who called his girlfriend a bitch, Ben shouts: "I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching the guy! I want to go back to punching him!"

And there were moments when the images were wonderful: Radar, naked underneath his graduation gown, persuades Q to buy him a tee shirt in a fuel stop on the road trip. There are two problems with this: L means extra extra large in this state (Georgia) and it has a confederate flag on the front. Radar is black.

Flicking through it again I find that there are so many funny moments. When Ben has just kissed his girlfriend and asks Q for advice as to whether he did it right, Q tells him that "The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful and should be used sparingly." He then discovers that Ben's girlfriend is standing behind him. She tells him that "Ben's tongue is like sunscreen ... It's good for your health and should be applied liberally." Wow. And wow and wow and wow.

This is a very funny comic novel with some very exciting moments and some tragic teenage angst. A great read.

September 2015; 306 pages

Other teen fiction books by the brilliant John Green include An Abundance of Katherines , Turtles All the Way Down, and the stupendous  The Fault in Our Stars
You might also enjoy teen fiction The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky