Fiction: Submarine By Joe Dunthorne Hamish Hamilton, 289pp. £16.99It's an unsettling feeling to be about 30 pages into a new novel and realise with a sort of dispirited certainty that you're both the wrong age and sex to be reading the book in the first place.
And it's not about some sort of literary pigeonholing but I suspect there are times in one's life when a coming-of-age book whose central character is a possibly damaged, certainly weird 15-year-old boy might have greater resonance, for example if you had a great big spotty teen loafing around the house or if you were a bloke and your own teenage years were still relatively fresh in your memory. It doesn't help that the publishers have billed Submarine as "hilarious" - which almost invites the reader to be thin lipped and stoney faced throughout - or maybe that's just me. Now before anyone writes in to point out the screamingly obvious, that one of the great joys of literature is that it can propel you into any number of different worlds, well of course that's true but it's also true that the first novel written as a coming-of-age story is a sub-genre all of its own and it's a difficult one to pull off no matter how clever the writing.
And this undoubtedly is clever writing. Joe Dunthorne is a graduate of the most famous creative writing programme in Britain, the one at the University of East Anglia (graduates include Ian McEwan, Anne Enright, John Boyne, Tracy Chevalier), where he won the Curtis Brown Prize. The 25 year-old is already a published poet, and Submarine is his first, much anticipated novel - bidding war between six publishers, film rights already sold, the whole starry package. Set in Swansea (the Cork-Swansea ferry has a cameo role) the story follows some months in the life of 15-year-old Oliver Tate and in particular the inner workings of his busy imagination and his real-life relationships with his friends and his parents.
His friends are Chip, the school's most vicious bully, and Jordana, his eczema-afflicted girlfriend, with whom he is desperate to lose his virginity before it's legal (age 16). His dad suffers bouts of depression (Oliver knows this by going through the rubbish and finding empty packs of medication) and his mum has hooked up with an old boyfriend and goes on a meditation retreat with him, which Oliver suspects is a cover for infidelity.
He obsessively charts his parents' sex life - if the dimmer switch in their bedroom is moved halfway he knows there's been some romantic activity; he worries about his mother getting pregnant and counts her tampons so he'll know she's using them, and he monitors the people in their quiet neighbourhood, for example; "The ugly woman at number 14 is a triskaidekaphobic. She fears the number thirteen". Oliver has a dictionary and so chapter headings are obscure or difficult words - euthenics, quidnunc - a tedious device typical of the knowing cleverness that's everywhere in the narrative, getting in the way of real engagement.
Towards the end of the book he says "Ever since Jordana dumped me, I've started feeling like a midde-aged person. I think it has to do with trauma. I just walk around doing an impression of a sixteen-year old". For this reader at least, who admits being out of touch with the inner workings of a teenage boy's mind, Olly comes over as an impression of a 16-year-old boy, albeit written in a clever, rather-pleased-with-itself style. With Dunthorne's wordplay instead of blood running through Oliver's veins it's too difficult to get into his world, something that has to happen if the reader is to be engaged right through a coming-of-age novel.
Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist
