J. D. Salinger 1919–2010
1951 The Catcher in the Rye
It is against the odds that this book, which had such a cult following in its day, and during the twenty years after publication, should still be fresh and fascinating. But it is still fresh and fascinating.
It tells the story of a few days in the life of a sixteen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield who, about to be thrown out of another expensive school, escapes to New York. He books into a hotel, tries to lose his virginity, meets his kid sister — the scene where he sneaks into the apartment is magnificent — and ponders on the nature of things. His thought process is direct and unforgettable, he has odd fascinations and desires, he has great loves and hates, and he has a most peculiar and impressive sort of intelligence. Clearly, he needs psychiatric help, but psychiatric help also needs him (and his version of the encounter would be by far the more interesting). In other words, Salinger created a character who stays in the mind, whose first-person narrative the reader enters completely, whose verbal quirks — and he has many — remain funny and do not irritate, and whose story is likely to survive into the far future.
J. D. Salinger was born in New York. His other books include Franny and Zooey (1961) and two collections of stories. At the time of his death he had lived in seclusion in New Hampshire for many years.
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Frank Sargeson 1903–1982
1965 Memoirs of a Peon
Michael Newhouse, New Zealand Casanova, is the protagonist of this picaresque satire, which takes us from his childhood through his youth to his later years, by way of the procession of vociferous women who catch his eye.
Michael is a puffball of conceit, one of those oblivious men who specialize in making others aware of their own intelligence and emotional requirements. Thus a puzzled sense of indignation wafts through Michael’s story, as he perambulates around Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua and the farms and towns of the North Island, extending his favours to mothers and daughters, utterly unconcerned with his country’s complacent, puritanical values. Circumstance constantly foils him as he snuffles around for a corner of New Zealand life where a more diverse sexuality and a more willing attitude to copulation can be discovered.
Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from the comic grace of its narrative. Michael, raised by his Edwardian grandparents, has mastered a sedate New Zealand version of their formal prose which fluently decorates his descriptions of the ‘raging pit of disappointment’ fate always seems to place in his path. Seeming artless, this novel is artful, a radical work using the life and times of an intelligent rake to stick pins into conventional pomposities, in New Zealand in particular, and in the world in general.
Frank Sargeson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and lived and wrote in New Zealand. Important works are stories, Conversations with My Uncle (1936) and the novel The Hangover (1967).
Age in year of publication: sixty-two.
Paul Scott 1920–1978
1966 The Jewel in the Crown
India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the possession most loved, most influential, most mourned. This is the first volume of Scott’s grand work The Raj Quartet, and is set in 1942, the beginning of tumultuous times, with Europe at war and India in ferment, raging with anti-British riots, on the road to Independence.
Rape is at the centre of events, the political rape of India by the British, the physical rape of Daphne Manners by Indian peasants in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore, an outrage which reverberates immediately and for many years to come throughout the British community in India. And throughout the Indian communities too, for Daphne Manners had committed the unforgivable sin of falling in love with a Hindu, Hari Kumar. He, in turn, a Hindu educated at an English public school, is an outcast in both worlds.
Over Scott’s vast landscape hovers the magnificence of India itself, almost a spectator, watching as Scott moves through the past, present and future to show that just as there was no mercy in British India for those who transgressed Imperial rules so, subtly, mercilessness became the weapon upon which the British impaled themselves.
Paul Scott was born and lived in London. The books that follow The Jewel in the Crown in The Raj Quartet, which became a successful television series in 1983 as The Jewel in the Crown, are The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of Spoils (1975). Staying On, a coda to The Raj Quartet, won the Booker Prize in 1977.
Age in year of publication: forty-six.
Hubert Selby Jr. 1928–2004
1964 Last Exit to Brooklyn
This is written with a freedom and flow and use of vernacular and voice that make it compelling and hugely readable. It is full of dirty language and dirty longings and dirty activity in general, including the most appalling violence; it is strictly for maiden aunts. It is a set of loosely connected stories in which some characters reappear, in which an all-night diner called The Greek regularly features. It includes some of the most unsavoury characters in modern fiction: a crowd who hang around the bar and beat up soldiers; a ‘hip queer’ called Georgette who is in love with a man called Vinnie and gets her leg cut by a knife by the crowd from the bar; and a woman called Tralala, one of the strongest characters in the book, who does the most appalling things to a soldier, generally hangs around looking for trouble and gets badly beaten in the end. One of the longest scenes is about a strike and a man called Harry, who is lazy and drunken and bloody-minded and unhappily married. Slowly, he realizes he is gay, and there are terrible consequences. The last scene is set in a low-life housing project. The tone of the book is cold and angry; Selby moves among the damned with an urge to tell us — to yell at us, if necessary — that this is what the American dream looks like now, that this is what hell is like, and there is no possibility of redemption. Some people, including the man who owned Blackwell’s bookshop and Robert Maxwell, if you don’t mind, succeeded in having the book banned for a short while when it was first published in England.
Hubert Selby Jr. was born in Brooklyn and lived in Los Angeles. His other books include The Room (1971) and The Demon (1976).
Age in year of publication: thirty-six.
Will Self 1961–
1993 My Idea of Fun
A Cautionary Tale
The junkies’ group therapy session on page 175 of this novel would be its most savagely funny episode were it not for the ending, which provides the best last paragraph in modern fiction since Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
Will Self is a master of the grotesque and a pricker of conventional bubbles. In his hands the gentility of the English is hung, drawn, quartered and then incinerated for good measure. What could be more genteel than the south-coast town of Saltdean where Ian Wharton, our hero, first makes an appearance? Ian has eidesis, or photographic memory, which is good news for the Fat Controller, who descends upon Saltdean, Ian and anyone who gets in his way. He knows what to do with eidesis and how to turn the repulsive Ian into his significant other, using disgusting notions such as washing the face with semen soap as part of his regime.