We all claim to love our children at any age, but most of us will admit to having a particular period we liked best. For some it’s the dumply roundness of babies, for others the wobbly curiosity of toddlerhood, while yet others are captivated by the raw enthusiasm of older children. I’ve met enthusiasts for all of these stages, but I’m still waiting to meet a parent who says that the time they loved the best was when their kids hit adolescence.

It’s almost a truism to say that teenagers are difficult and teenage boys in particular launch themselves towards adulthood in ways which would have even the most loving parent drawing up plans for a shallow grave in the back garden. They embrace drugs and alcohol, spend your money, cultivate dodgy acquaintances, develop an enthusiasm for doing absolutely nothing and eating absolutely everything and forget anything they ever learned about personal hygiene. Granted, teenage girls do some of these things too, but being girls, remember at least to wash. And even if teenage boys possess the one saving grace of not being able to get pregnant, they more than compensate for that by indulging in patterns of destructiveness which would impress Caligula.

Possibly this is why they form the chaotic center around which so many works of fiction revolve and not in the sense of just being the protagonist. It’s important to draw a distinction between books for teenagers and books about teenagers: these boys aren’t the vehicle for the story, chosen because the target audience will readily identify with their particular set of dilemmas. In the three books which follow, these teenage dirtbags are the story.

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

Translated into almost every language on the planet, still selling in the thousands every year, The Catcher in the Rye isn’t just a book, it’s a rite of passage and its central character, Holden Caulfield, is probably one of the most discussed, if not dissected, literary figures of modern times.

This is what J.D. Salinger, Holden’s creator, had to say about him:





That’s right. Nothing. Notoriously reclusive, Salinger passed away two years ago without breaking his sixty year silence about who or what had inspired him to write about a boy who hates the world, hates most of the people in it and whose only expressed ambition is based on a misunderstanding of a trite, sentimental song by Robert Burns.

Some think that Salinger based Holden on himself – after graduating from a Military Academy very similar to the fictional Pency Prep his educational career was patchy – but the links are tenuous and because of Salinger’s silence, speculative. But it’s not surprising that the connection is made for the simple reason that Holden is probably one of the most ‘real’ characters we ever encounter between the pages of a book. Entering this story is like entering Holden’s head – he doesn’t speak to you, you think him. Even though the book begins as a narration, that conceit swiftly disappears. Holden tells his story as directly and unemotionally as if he were addressing it to a blank wall. He doesn’t ask for your understanding, or express guilt or shame. He doesn’t need to. He’s not talking to another person, he’s talking to himself.

This is why The Catcher in the Rye was instantaneously successful and continues to be solidly popular. As Holden would put it, there’s nothing phony about it. Holden represents nothing but himself. He’s not burdened with interpretations or themes or philosophy. You could say he’s the direct opposite of A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, who is only real in the sense that he expresses Burgess’ ideas about the nature of free will and the proper relationship between the state and the individual. Holden is free of all that baggage. He just is who he is. His judgments are instant, peremptory and contradictory. His emotions vacillate. He is simultaneously naïve, knowing, boastful and kind. In other words, he’s a seventeen year old boy or as close to one as a work of fiction is ever going to get.

At the end of the book Holden has this to say about his situation:

‘A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.’

When you finish The Catcher in the Rye you do it with similar feelings to parents driving away from the campus grounds, their child a shrinking figure in the rearview mirror. Relief (life is going to be simpler). Regret (they grow up so fast). A pang of anxiety (will they ever learn to cope?). They do. And so, we hope, will Holden.

Vernon Little in Vernon God Little

The announcement of the Booker Prize winner is rarely free from controversy – even shoo-ins like Wolf Hall have their occasional detractors - but the sound that greeted the 2004 winner wasn’t a murmur of dissent. It was a full throated howl of disbelief. Vernon God Little split opinion as neatly as a butcher’s knife cleaving a spinal column. ‘Unutterable tedious nastiness and vulgarity’ sputtered Theodore Dalrymple in The Spectator. ‘Startling and excellent debut’ cheered The Guardian. Whatever your view on DBC Pierre’s win, there’s no doubt that his eponymous hero Vernon, leaves an indelible impression. Vernon’s dry Texas twang resonates long after the book is closed and even if you’re left with the occasional impression that Vernon sometimes becomes a mouthpiece for his grown up author’s opinions, he’s real enough – not as real as Holden, but a genuine person.

But only genuine in the sense of having an existence, not in the sense of truthful. Vernon’s an unreliable narrator. Accused of complicity in a High School killing, he changes his story about what happened the day his friend Jesus opened fire in the gym throughout the book and he does it in the way kids do – the admissions teased out as events conspire against him. If Holden is a teenage boy captured in amber, Vernon is the adolescent in transition. When we meet him, he’s an indolent waste of space, scornful commentator on the deadend, consumer-goods-obsessed corner of the US he inhabits. When events force him, blinking and naked as a hermit crab deprived of its shell, out of his comfort zone of drugs and mild failure, he bases his dreams of escape on bad films – a beach hut in Mexico with a Baywatch babe at his side – and it’s only when he ends up on Death Row, that Vernon starts to toughen up. When he finally emerges from the other side of his ordeal, we see that his journey to adulthood is complete and that he is now ready to fully exploit the opportunities his reality-tv-obsessed world offers him.

Here, Vernon meditates while the clock ticks towards the hour of his execution:

‘A terminal learning comes to me: that for all the sirens, game-show buzzers, and drum-rolls of life, it is the nature of men to die quietly. I mean, what kind of life was that? – a bunch of movies, and people talking about movies, and shows about people talking about movies. Still, I guess I asked for it. By being negative, destructive. I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I'd since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that.’

Kevin Katchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin

‘I think it’s amazing that so many people are willing to accept the risk,’ is Lionel Shriver’s comment about the decision to have a baby. Typically analytical, that sentence exposes the whole thesis of Shriver’s most famous and bestselling book. We call undeniable truths ‘motherhood statements’ in the sense that ‘motherhood is a good thing’ is undeniably true, but the irony that Shriver ruthlessly latches onto is that motherhood isn’t a motherhood statement at all, it’s the beginning of a journey which could end, not just in tears, but in murder.

The story of Kevin and what he does is narrated by his mother Eva in a series of letters to her absent husband Franklin. If this device sounds distancing, then that’s intentional. We never get to experience Kevin directly. Everything we read about him is reflected through the prism of his mother, distorted or highlighted not only by the terrible thing that Kevin has done, but by Eva’s own preoccupations and beliefs. And the picture that gradually develops is chilling. Kevin is the changeling, the real child that replaces the dreamchild we carry for nine long months. He’s wrong from the beginning – nothing like what Eva expects – and as time goes on he only gets wronger. Every mother knows that one day her children will turn into adults, but boys turn into men and there’s a deep and strange alienation at the heart of that transition. Our boys are like us, but they can never be like us in the way that daughters can. There’s a deeper Otherness at the root of Kevin too. Eva loves to travel, has built a business around that love and has a relationship with the US that is wry and conflicted. She feels that unlike many of her fellow Americans, she knows the world. But Kevin – his thoughts, his mind - is as unavailable to her as a Communist state in lock down. Her exile from the place she most desperately wants to visit speaks to a deep truth about our children. When they are babies, there’s no part of them left unexposed to us. When they become adults, their lives become a circle across which we only sometimes intersect.

After Kevin destroys a child’s treasured teaset, Eva has this conversation with him:

‘“How would you feel kiddo, if you had something that you cared about more than anything, and you brought it to show to the class, and then someone smashed it?”

“Like what?” he asked, innocence tinged with self-congratulation.

I reached casually in my head for an example of a possession that Kevin especially cherished and it wasn’t there.’

Holden is quintessential, a snapshot of a stage we all remember with mingled affection and discomfort, Vernon is on the shambling roadtrip which ends with maturity and Kevin – well perhaps the best way to understand Kevin’s dark persuasive horror is see him as Holden’s dark twin. With Holden nothing is hidden. With Kevin everything is. And perhaps it’s better left that way.