Backlisted - Locklisted: Teenage Books Special

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

This Locklisted episode is the sequel to our earlier Children's Books Special. It was recorded in August 2020 and was previously available exclusively to supporters of our Patreon at patreon.com/backlisted. This time we cover our teenage years and the tricky transition into ‘adult’ readers. Much of the conversation is dominated by of our re-reading of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, but you also get John falling for James Joyce at seventeen (via Wilbur Smith), Nicky moving from Puffin Plus to Douglas Coupland, a digression on the horror novels of Stephen King and James Herbert and a haunting reading by Andy from Graham Greene. Backlisted is entirely funded by the contributions of our Patreons - many thanks to them! *If you would like to hear all past episodes of Locklisted and support Backlisted in the process, please sign up as a Locklistener or Master Storyteller at patreon.com/backlisted.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello, everybody. I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm Nikki Birch. I'm Backlisted's producer. And thanks for downloading this episode of Locklisted. We've put this onto the general Backlisted feed because we had such nice feedback to the children's reading episode of Locklisted that we put up in January. And back in August, when we recorded that,

we also recorded the episode you're about to hear, a sequel about the books that we read or loved when we were teenagers. So that was our children's reading episode, and this is our teenage reading episode. And there's quite a lot of discussion here specifically about J.D. Salinger and the catcher in the rye because that's the book everybody or nearly everybody reads that when they're a teenager and we did a lot of reading of salinger uh last summer so that feeds into this as well and nick i can't there was also a sort of general chat around kind of young adult fiction wasn't there and whether it's changed a bit um as well and uh and we all kind of talked

about the books that we read as teenagers and influences that we had yeah that's right and i think we might have mentioned slugs by sean hudson but if we did if we didn't and we really i'm mentioning it now anyway lock listed is a podcast that we make for people who support our patreon above a certain level what they called lot listeners and master storytellers and master storytellers and basically for those people who very kindly support us um through patreon you get an extra podcast um two extra podcasts a month and so if you want to get the extra podcasts the lot listed podcast just head to our patreon account which is patreon.com forward slash that listed and that's how we pay for that listed so if you want to support that listed and it really is a bonus

get these episodes of lot listed where we talk about books and we also talk about film music art tv and ideas we're currently working our way john is working his way through the wire and we are having a kind of running commentary throughout that so it's sort of like the behind the scenes show of backlisted is what you get on lock listed anyway everybody thanks very much for listening enjoy this episode of lock listed on our favorite teenage books which was recorded in august last year see you next time well we'd like to thank listeners the beatles for sending that in uh was that your um was that your teenager teenage life represented there andy in a way it was what What, trying to shoehorn myself into the Beatles? Yes.

Were you into the Beatles as a teenager? Have you not noticed? My teenage life? My whole life? Yeah, yeah. So I keep this short, but in a nutshell, I borrowed the Red and Blue albums from Caterham Library in 1980, early 1980. And I can remember listening to

specifically Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Forever, and I Am The Walrus. And having never heard music like that, it was like music from another planet. It was the best music, the best music that I'd ever, ever heard. So I'd started buying Beatles records in the summer of 1980. And then, of course, John Lennon was shot in December 1980, connecting us to one of the books we're going to talk about today. John Lennon was shot in 1980, and like most of the rest of the world, I went Beatles crazy at that point, I think. So do you know that's funny?

Because I, as a late teen, got quite into reggae and helped buy Wilsdon Library, which for a while was my I, as a late teen, got quite into reggae and helped by Wilsdon Library, which for a while was my nearest library as a late teenager, which had a very good selection of kind of 80s and 90s reggae. So I used to borrow them. Yeah, you know, Wilsdon, big black population in Brent and around there. And so I would, you know, and I borrowed loads of CDs particularly, and would tape them, obviously. That's what you did.

Yeah. Thanks to the library. Libraries are amazing. I'm slightly different, but when I was at college, there was a really good, there is still a very good library in Oxford that wasn't attached to the university, just the Oxford Public Library.

And they had a fantastic collection. So I took out lots and lots of opera. I was having a bit of an opera jag. And they could you know they're really expensive to buy quite big in those days so you just buy them and take them it's fantastic oh do you remember the audio books that you'd get from the library and they came in these cassettes these massive blocks and you'd open them be like cassette one because you'd want the kind of unabridged wouldn't you and that's where you get them in the library I borrowed the in 19 i know because i can remember when it was because you can date this because of the in 1981 i borrowed the ruttles lp from caitlyn library

there must have been a beatles fan working at caitlyn library i knew nothing about the ruttles i'd never seen the tv i'd never even was a python fan i'd never heard of it and I looked at it it was like oh this looks like four Beatles records and I so I remember listening to it I sort of knew it was a mickey tape but it's not a mickey take at the same time it's the most wonderful love letter to to the Beatles and to those records yeah so yes so so here we are by the time you hear this you probably will have heard an episode we recorded about childhood reading and we so enjoyed that we thought well we wanted to keep those teenage dreams alive yeah rolling on into teenage reading because that teenage period is the time where you either I think you either get the reading thing for life or you drift away maybe not forever but

but it's the transition is transition is the tricky time. It is really tricky. It's definitely that thing of feeling that you don't want to be reading kids' books anymore. And did you ransack your... We talked about what our parents had on their shelves. Did you actively start prowling mum and dad's shelves for stuff that looked a bit racier or scarier?

No, I sort of did that thing of talking to other boys at school and trying to figure out what they were reading. And it was mostly crap. But I mean, the book that I'll talk about, I won't really talk about it much because I haven't re-read it since but it was The Sunbird by

Wilbur Smith was a big moment for me. It was my attempt to read a big adult novel with kind of adult characters and sex in it. It was my attempt to read a big adult novel with kind of adult characters and sex in it. It was published in 72, and it was apparently a bit of a change of pace for Wilbur, who has now gone on, as we probably all know, to write at least 35 novels, I think,

but enough for anyone. And it was set in Africa, as usual, but it was an archaeological dig where they'd found a lost city of the Phoenicians. So the archaeological stuff kind of interested me. But mostly it was a sort of battle about two men. There was a kind of, what I

remember, there was the archaeologist and the other protagonist were in love with the same woman. And there was the intelligent, smart, sensitive one missed out on the girl. It's been a bit of a theme in kind of teenage reading. But it was, I can remember being i can remember enjoying you know the page turning plot and i enjoyed the feeling and i went on to read

other ones and i read some desmond bagley but i want to be honest as i'll say i i was reading i'm having to read classics for school and i just couldn't i couldn't get on with the the predictability and the woodenness and the i didnness. They weren't enjoyable enough. I think you were a far more advanced reader than I was. Except I would just read Lord of the Rings. I read it every year, I think I told you, for seven years. I read Lord of the Rings a lot. Nothing matched it for years for me.

It will surprise listeners who are familiar with me from my love of the neglected lady novelist to learn that i went through a jack higgins phase who's jack higgins is good right nicky as you say right jack higgins who's jack higgins jack higgins was one of the best-selling authors of the 1970s and 80s and to think we would live in a world now where people wouldn't know who jack higgins is of course of course they don't because it because it's phenomenally popular in his day it's all sort of the eagle has landed luciano's luck was my favorite that was a sort of world war ii mafia based one but most of my contemporaries i would like to ask nikki well i want to most of my contemporaries if they read when we were all 13 or 14

so this is like in the mid 80s they loved stephen king james herbert sean hudson was those three it was that kind of sex and horror that those were the things they really liked and i never really i don't know about you john i never i never really got on with those i think stephen king is a good writer i've read i don't know i haven't tried reading one since i was a kid but i i liked stephen king yeah i went through the stephen king phase did you can you remember one that you particularly liked it it's is that stephen king yeah yeah it's i really liked misery um that's a very good that's just a very good, hands down, very, very good book. It's good.

But Misery and my two favourites of his are Misery and The Shining. Yeah. Both of which are books about, it doesn't change, they're both really books about writing. One is a book about writer's block and the other is a book about how bad it is to have fans. That's the stan of its day. I think the thing with Stephen King, I got into Stephen King via Stand By Me because I absolutely was obsessed by Stand By Me.

And that film is based on a Stephen King book called The Body, which actually isn't as good as the film. You know, The Body is, it was a lot, but that kind of led me in. I would argue that the same is true of The Shining, which I think is a masterpiece, a cinematic masterpiece. Stephen King would disagree. He would. So, Nicky, what were your contemporaries reading first when you were a teenager, if they were reading?

And what were you reading? I think you're right, actually. I think the sort of the horror and sci-fi. And so I'm 10 years younger, roughly, I think, about that, maybe eight years younger. But I think those books still stood. And Stephanie Stephen King was a big author. And I think it was exciting. It's that moment, isn't it, when you get to read, A, scary stuff, B, sexy stuff.

Those are two sort of things. And also big books like there's you know but this is before harry potter because harry potter was quite is like the first big books for kids whereas actually books for kids always quite small when we were younger and there's a sort of thing of like i'm older now i can tackle a big book and stephen king would give you the big book holiday big holiday blockbuster-y kind of yeah you might just made you feel like more grown up by even holding one. Yeah, and it's, you know, there's swearing

and there's all sorts of things in there which are, you know, and so I think my contemporaries were reading that and I read a bit of those things. I wasn't sort of obsessed, but I read a bit of them. But I also was really into, which is very strange for how I can think about it now, but I really liked the kind of true crime, real life Jack the Ripper

what actually happened any books that was like gruesome murders from this particular era laying them all out and I would love I'd lap that up just horrible stuff I went through a period of reading that kind of shocking non-fiction

like Gordon Rattray Taylor's The Doomsday Book, you know, The Planet is Doomed. Did you? Well, as a teenager. Yeah, Eric von Daniken. I did quite a bit of that as well. Really? Just because I...

I think they're just because they were... I don't know why it was... I'm just that little bit, because my teens were really the 70s. I think this is really interesting. You know, on one level, in one one sense we are all the same age but when we atomize it down to our teenage years those two or three years or four or five years difference yeah totally makes a difference in the landscape of it this is what i thought after the children's episode actually you know the

cultural life moves at a faster rate for teenagers anyway. But also fashions come and go quicker in terms of reading and books as they do in everything else. It's the same. It's like with your siblings. We'll talk about this more when we talk about the book we're going to talk about. But the difference between 15 and 18, it's an unbridgeable chasm. You're interested in different things you don't hang out with the same people and it's ridiculous now and i think my my brother and i are extremely close despite living on the other side of the earth i mean but extremely close but you know when we

were teenagers that's probably the most apart we've ever been as people because we had our own friends and you know i didn't want to be seen with him and his friends. He was younger, I take it. So what was he reading? No, no. What was he reading three years later is almost a better question. Because that's what I did. And he just wouldn't. That was his thing.

I'm not going to read. That's what you do. No, you read. I mean, he could and he did, but he didn't do it very openly. He was interested in music and he was good at sport. But reading was definitely my thing. My brother wouldn't read either. He was older, but my mum occasionally would kind of, he was really into football.

My mum occasionally would push him this kind of napper goes for goal. You know, this kind of like, here you go, read a, what's it called? Farley Mellat? Oh, the name. It was sort of like a, you know, boys novels. There weren't so many boys novels at the time as there are now. But yeah, she would try and attempt to sort of push stuff at him, but it never worked and he was never a big reader. It's a really interesting, never-ending publishing perennial problem

you're describing there, Nicky. How do you encourage reluctant readers? And because these years are the years where people drift away. So for both, you know, societal and also commercial reasons, encourage reluctant readers and because these years are the years where people drift away so for both you know societal and also commercial reasons it's in people's interest to try and keep kids reading but I mean there will be different views on this I hasten to add but the conversation in children's publishing is always do we go after kids teenagers who don't like reading or do we go after teenagers who do like reading well i was thinking

about you know the ya fiction now is market is pretty big right it's pretty successful you know if you go to a bookstore there's very satisfying amount of kind of ya fiction and i remember going to the bookstore when i was a younger teenager before we moved to wilsdon where we lived in belsize park and there was a bookshop there and I remember like you know it's probably I don't know half a meter you know what I mean it was very not very much of a kind of yeah and but we used to go and probably we would just me and my friend Emma funnily enough who's a feature before we would go and we pretty much do the whole lot we would take the whole lot you know we could do the horror but then we could do the romance and I found one of my old books that I

was really into this Penguin Plus which was a kind of ya penguin plus i remember and i've still got i thought i might it's called mel can i read you the back of mel the blurb yeah puff puffin plus surely i think it's is it puffin plus it doesn't have a puffin yes it is puffin i don't know actually i don't know puffin plus penguin books It doesn't really say whether it's Puffin or Penguin. Just calls it Plus. Give us the blurb. Mel by Liz Berry. 17-year-old Melody Calder is desperate for her life to change,

but she isn't prepared for the turmoil into which she's thrown following her mother's nervous breakdown. Left alone in their squalid house, Mel determines to repair and redecorate. Then, while searching for furniture in a local junk shop, she meets the dangerously attractive Mitch Hamilton, lead guitarist with top rock group Assassination. I love those guys. Maybe they could do us a theme tune.

Mitch is keen to help with the house, but Mel is suspicious of his enthusiasm. So when Mitch announces his intention to marry Mel no one is more astounded than Mel herself except perhaps for Mitch's jealous ex-girlfriend the formidable Roxy Lee and you know what I loved it and I actually thinking I might read it again that's a damn sight better than many of the blurbs we read on that and do you think Andy I I wasn't really aware i'm sure now there probably is but i i felt that girls were better catered for teenage girls were reading those series books even in the 70s the sort of mallory towers and nancy drew mysteries and i i was never really kind of maybe it was

it was i just wasn't interested but i wasn't aware that there were boys books in the same way i remember one weird summer reading P.C. Wren, who wrote Beau Jest and Beau Sabreur about life in the Foreign Legion. And I can remember absolutely not one incident from any of them. I think I read three of them in short order. I'm interested at what you're saying there in relation to what Nicky was saying as well about YA and how popular YA is now.

I mean, I can remember what passed for YA when I was a teenager. I wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole. I just felt it was the equivalent of John Hughes films from the States. I felt I was being marketed. I felt I was a target market and I didn't want to be a target market. Yes, it's full strength Capstan or I'm not going to be bothered. Yeah. So I would swerve. But my. So I was thinking about this. Where did I get my book recommendations from when I tried to find my way out of the children's world?

And like John says, you know, I mean, I really loved Douglas Adams. Oh, yes. Yes. Really, really loved Douglas Adams. Oh, yes, yes. Really, really loved Douglas Adams. Again, we've talked about before where you know something so well it becomes comforting and mesmerising and funny at the same time. Well, you know, the Hitchhiker's Books and the radio series particularly had a big effect on my life. Actually, I've written about this, but I do think the idea of Adams was so brilliant at presenting, not merely writing, but presenting himself as a writer is tremendously seductive the idea that you were

so brilliant that you could turn in a book extremely late and it would be great and you know but also the idea that you could take clever ideas and have fun with them that's very appealing to a teenager to a teenage boy particularly i think that that that idea that you could be clever and make people laugh that's a powerful thing but i i didn't really like the stephen king or the james herbert or the or the sean hudson stuff that we were talking about and the book that i did really like which was absolute beginners by colin mckinnis we've done a whole episode on go and find that listeners if you want to hear me talking about the influence that had on my life.

Because, as I say, that was my teenage kind of... Did you guys ever get into... In my late teens, I was into Douglas Copeland, Generation X. Was that a bit after your time? No, because I'm in my early to mid-twenties. And therefore... You raise a really interesting point. Because that was peak.

I was like a late teen. And I was doing my A- a late teen and that was just i was doing my a levels and that was like oh my god he's speaking to me you know right now by that point i've become conscious of these things called the books pages right and and the literary world and so it's hard to find a direct line into it that doesn't route you through what other people are writing and where it fits and all that stuff no why sorry just i've finished this thought my i consider myself really really lucky to have been 16 years old in 1984 because i got most of my ideas about the books that i could read and could find from what the bands i liked that i read about in the nme were reading because reading then in

marked contrast to what happened in the 90s, reading then is, however pretentiously, in your long overcoat, but bands talked about books and were asked what they thought about books and were asked to name books. And so all those things that on one level we would scoff at as clichéd, like reading Sartre or Camus, or I look back and I think god I was really lucky that I had I don't know Ian McCulloch saying that he never went anywhere without a copy of

La Nose or whatever because I still read them and we often say on Batlisted well there's no point reading anything before you're 40 and we're you know we'll come on we'll come back around to that in a minute but how fantastic to be 15 and being pressured into reading something brilliant, even if you don't understand it, as opposed to feeling nobody's reading, so you don't need to read. I think that's a really lucky fluke of being where and when I was that particular age at that particular moment. John, where did you get your recommendations from?

I think you're right about sort of bands. And I mean, part of it was because my mum was teaching and we had English teachers who were quite smart. And I can't remember. I remember a book that really helped me bridge the gap was The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, which I must have read when I was probably my last year at school. Oh, I can remember The Wasp Factory so clearly in the library. That's interesting. Yeah, that was a big book. That was read by a lot of kids at school the wasp factory was a big book yeah it's hard to imagine now what was driving your reading in the same way I mean you know you

were having to read classic novels and I did enjoy reading all the sort of the classic novels that we were studying but it's definitely there was a there was a kind of turning point for me that was the reading that the portrait of the artist by Joyce me that was the reading, the Portrait of the Artist by Joyce. That was the classic book that kind of, it's a sort of bridging book between the book we're going to talk about and the rest of my life, I think. How old were you when you read that? When I was 17, my last year at school. Wow. John, I'm going to offer a Nicky birch style thing did you find it

hard to read um the thing is yes but i think by that stage i was already i was looking for stuff that was difficult i mean in that tiny time it's very very teenage kind of way and that book boy that book is you know it is it is a challenge. Oh, I reread it last year and I found it challenging. Where would you read it, John, when you were 17? Where would you... Talk me through the sort of scenario where you would read a challenging book. What do you mean? Where physically would I...

Where? Yeah, yeah. Go on, talk us through how would it work? I would read it. I'd read it. You know, I'd read... I used to read at night and I used to read... I've always got up and read in the mornings.

It's just a habit i got that i got that habit as a teenager because i realized pretty quickly there was usually if i didn't do that i would never i always got up before everybody else because i like doing that and i would set the table for breakfast and then i would eat my breakfast and then i would go and read for an hour and that that was a habit which i've sort of more or less kept to for the rest of my life i think think, you know, when you get the questions, how do you fit it all in? Reading was just, that was, I realised if I didn't do that, all I would ever do is read books for school, you know, textbooks and set novel.

And I read Portrait of the Artist, and, you know, that kind of prose is, I mean, off the scale. By the end of that book, the final section of that book, and the sort of the talking about being an artist and being a writer and leaving home and and and writing a poem there's a famous he writes of incredibly difficult structured poem the villanelle of the temptress about this woman he fancies all of that roiling kind of unarticulated sexual stuff that feeling of not being attractive enough of never going to you know you were never going to find the really attractive girls were never going to find you attractive.

Suddenly I found in Joyce this whole other universe that you could be, maybe what you could do is to write about those things. And it was a massive change. And from that moment onwards, I thought, you know, like a lot of teenagers, I thought, what I really want to do is to be a writer. And did you? Well, it's debatable.

I have written books. Yes. But it's, when you're, you know, as it were, when you take all the onion skins away, at the core of, I don't think I've changed in my ambition. And if I would be a happier person, Andy and I were talking, when we were talking earlier about Andy

and getting and writing, getting stuff done, I'd be happier if I could write more. I always go to Thomas Mann you know a writer is a person who finds writing more difficult than other people and I think because you know we've both worked as publishers you know we've both worked as editors we both we worked we I know I have published some genuinely kind of important award-winning writers so it's but strangely none of that matters in the end when you're doing your own thing you know doing your own thing when you're it's you and this idea of this strange idea of the ideal

reader trying to work your own stuff out but i i honestly don't think anybody who's writing really writing finds it easy you know i mean i know i know there are people that was always my advice to authors when i worked with whenever they would say was they would inevitably i'm really struggling with this i would would say, it's okay. Let me let you into a trade secret. Writing books is hard. All books. Just writing about one subject for more than

500 words is hard. Let alone 50,000 or 100,000 words. To go back to your desk every day and go back to the same thing you thought about yesterday and the day before that and the month before that and the year before that requires almost physical strength not just mental strength physical strength to do it doesn't require as much physical strength as working down a mine everybody clearly that's a more demanding physical task but nevertheless it

isn't nothing nikki i want to ask you some more about what you were did you read a lot of this were you a teenage reader or did you drift away i I did drift away. Yeah, I did. I think I got into other teenage pursuits like not being at home. And I think you have to be at home to read. I felt as I was asking you, John, about where you read. I was, you know, after 15, I was not at home. I was out. And I think that that sort of affected me not reading. But I did, you know, I did carry on a bit. And my lovely mum did still kind of continually try and kind of educate me up until I left home so when I was about in the gap year so to speak yeah I did my A-levels going off to university went away for a year and I went to live in St Vincent and the Grenadines which is a or St Vincent which is an island in the Caribbean and my mum shipped me off with lots of literature which she thought would be relevant.

So lots of black British authors and Caribbean authors. I know, she was very cool. And so I read those, well, some of those. I read Lonely Londoners and Wide Sagasa Sea and those sorts of things. So yeah, all really, really good books. Thanks, Christina, for giving me the only kind of, that was, you know, before then,

I probably wasn't reading anything. But, you know, at that point I was, help, what do i do for the next year thanks mum but i think that's really interesting that's all i mean that's both a unique story but also a kind of typical one you know whenever i'm asked are my son or daughter's a reluctant reader what would you recommend i sort of i never know what to say because i think that little lightning bolt is either going to strike or it isn't. And I've got a thing here. Nicky, we talked, I mean, we made a joke about it, but we talked on an earlier lot listed about the fact that we both lost our dads when we were relatively young.

And I'd just like to read you the beginning of the story that I can remember reading. You might know the story. I'm just going to not tell you who it is, but it kick-started a real obsession for me as a teenager, but also it's all tied in with that period of my life. And I found this story and this writer really helpful. So if you know who this is, say when I finish reading it, the story is called A Shocking Accident. Jerome was called into his housemaster's room in the break between the second and third class on a Thursday morning. He had no fear of trouble, for he was a warden, the name that the proprietor and headmaster of a rather expensive preparatory school had chosen to give to approved, reliable boys in the lower forms. From a warden, one became a guardian, and finally, before leaving it, was hoped for Marlborough Rugby, a crusader.

The housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, sat behind his desk with an appearance of perplexity and apprehension. Jerome had the odd impression when he entered that he was a cause of fear. Sit down, Jerome, Mr Wordsworth said. All going well with the trigonometry? Yes, sir. I've had a telephone call, Jerome, from your your aunt i'm afraid i have bad news for you yes sir your father has had an accident oh mr wordsworth looked at him with some surprise a serious accident yes sir jerome worshipped his father the The verb is exact. As man recreates God, so Jerome recreated his father from a restless widowed author into a mysterious adventurer who travelled in far places, Nice, Beirut, Mallorca, even the Canaries. The time had arrived about his eighth birthday when

Jerome believed that his father either ran guns or was a member of the British Secret Service. Now it occurred to him that his father might have been wounded in a hail of machine-gun bullets. Mr Wordsworth continued to play with the ruler on his desk. He seemed at a loss how to go on. He said, You know your father was in Naples? Yes, sir. Your aunt heard from the hospital today. Oh, Mr Wordsworth said with desperation. It was a street accident. Yes, sir. It seemed quite likely to Jerome that they would call it a street accident.

The police, of course, had fired first. His father would not take human life except as a last resort. I'm afraid your father was very seriously hurt indeed. Oh, in fact, Jerome, he died yesterday, quite without pain. Did they shoot him through the heart? I beg your pardon, what did you say, Jerome? Did they shoot him through the heart? Nobody shot him, Jerome. A pig fell on him.

An inexplicable convulsion took place in the nerves of Miss Ver Wordsworth's face. It really looked for a moment as though he were going to laugh. He closed his eyes, composed his features, and said rapidly, as though it were necessary to expel the story as rapidly as possible, your father was walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell on him. A shocking accident. Apparently in the poorer quarters of Naples, they keep pigs on their balconies. This one was on the fifth floor.

It had grown too fat. The balcony broke. The pig fell on your father. Mr Wordsworth left his desk rapidly and went to the window, turning his back on Jerome he shook a little with emotion Jerome said what happened to the pig?

and that's the ending of the opening of that story now I'm really laughing, Nicky you look almost you look almost pained by that I know, poor little Jerome I can remember reading that story the week after my father died and laughing and laughing and laughing i thought it was one of the funniest things that i'd ever read

who was it everybody it's uh i know it's all in there all the clues are in there go on it is a story called a shocking accident by graham green the story is not about that the rest of the story is about jerome growing up and going through his life and seeing if he can find anyone who he can tell about the circumstances of his father's death without making them laugh it is the most and sure enough the woman he marries is the is the woman who says to him not what happened to the pig but what happened to you right i is the most high wire act of a story is that do you think it's quite funny i'm going back to the fact that you know you see your dad die when you're a teenager did that spin you out into

reading more not bleak books but you know i mean because i think as you obviously at that point i imagine you get in touch with your emotions pretty quickly yeah i i did become having been obsessed and remaining obsessed with the beatles i did become completely obsessed with Graham Greene. Graham Greene, who I still love and I still hope we would do an episode on. We've talked about before, is the Catholicism of Greene a problem? Well, I wasn't a Catholic, but Greene is such a teenager in how he views the world, such an adolescent that it speaks to a certain kind of adolescent. And this is relevant again to the book we're going to talk about.

speaks to a certain kind of adolescent and this is relevant again to the book we're going to talk about a certain kind of long raincoat wearing british smith's listening teenager which is what i was you know i loved that combination of eeyore like gloom and humor and nikki i don't know about you but i i'm not saying when i told people about my father dying that they laughed of course they didn't laugh but there is an element of about how do you tell people in a way, like any bereavement, how do you tell people in a way that is truthful, emotionally truthful, but doesn't make them feel awkward? That's part of the one of the weird things about grief. And certainly as a sensitive teenager, you know, I didn't want to make anyone feel, I felt awkward know i didn't want to make anyone feel i felt awkward i didn't want to make anyone else feel any more awkward than they already felt so that

story really spoke to me and it's funny you know it's funny so that was helpful to me we'll be back in just a sec when did you uh when did you first read the catcher in the rye nikki when did you first read the catcher in the rye? Nicky, when did you first read The Catcher in the Rye? Do you know, I can't remember, but it would have been as a teenager, I think. Probably, I probably suspect it would be a late teen because I had a bit of a, you know, as I said, I went off not reading more than just kind of murder mysteries and things like, you know, true crime. Probably wasn't reading at all, out partying. And then did A-levels and did that thing where everything is so important.

You know, you're A-levels and did that thing where everything is so important. You know when you're at A-levels and you're like, everything's so meaningful. And that's when I got into Generation X. And I probably read Catcher in the Rye, I suspect, at that same time because life is really important when you're doing A-levels. So I suspect that would have been that end. I read it as a teenager. I'm sure John did. I'd just like to make the point before we start talking about it. Parts of the Catcher in the Rye were written 80 years ago.

It wasn't published to the early 50s, but it was written, a lot of it was written in the early to mid-1940s. And it still sells some incredible quantity of copies every year. And it's still accurate to say whatever one's position on it, it still represents or doesn't represent a teenage experience. That it has become part of the world's teenage experience to read the catcher in the rye so john when where can you remember where you were when you read it remember it really clearly because we moved house too much when i was

a kid i think i did sort of six or seven schools which was never great and the last big move was from a school in new zealand that i i'd not really enjoyed. I'd been quite aggressively bullied. And we arrived at a news school in Auckland. So I was 16 and I really liked this. It was one of those things, I found a school that, I hated school, as I think I've said, but for the first time I felt this was, you know, I had good teachers and I made friends

with a couple of other kind of geeky, well, you wouldn't have called, we wouldn't have defined ourselves as geeks then, but we were people who read and taught and we used to go to the theatre you know 16 year olds that kind of thing and I just remember reading it as a 16 year old knowing that Holden Caulfield was a 16 year old and it I mean I suppose like every kid who reads it the voice grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go to the last page and I remember reading it really quickly yeah I suppose that's what the book does.

It somehow internalises itself into your own sort of self-dramatising kind of instincts, that sense of the you against the world, of phoniness and crumminess. And going back and reading it is quite something. It's so, so much sad. I felt quite emotional rereading it. Really? So I read it the first time a few days before my 19th birthday no my 20th birthday i read it when i was 19 and i read it

very self-consciously knowing that it was a bit one had to read as a teenager and i better do it quick before i turn 20 right yeah and i'd already had my teenage epiphany with absolute beginners so in a sense 19 was too late to come to the catcher in the and i remember reading it and thinking yeah it's okay and this guy doesn't speak to me you know i was very chip on my shoulder about american books you know i was really into orwell and graham green and larkin and british articulations of these things and i was hostile to hunter thompson and heller and stuff that i felt we were being sold. And on the road, God help me, you know, these may have been countercultural products, but they were still American products that we were being forced to consume. And so the Catcher in the Rye kind of fell into that bracket.

And I can remember reading it and thinking, well, it was pretty good. Yeah, it was OK. You know, that guy's a bit of a pain in the arse. And then I read it the week before last, and I spent the whole book thinking, oh, man, this poor kid, this Holden Caulfield kid who's all front. But he's not all front. This kid's having a breakdown. Why can't anybody see that?

Why isn't anybody intervening for this child, right? And I don't want to spoil it. If for any reason you haven't read the catcher in the rye the knowledge that that he lets you know very sparingly that first of all he's lost a sibling and second of all he's watched a child at his school commit suicide in front of him in the space of this let's call it a six month period and these are though you could be forgiven for not realizing it spinning him out in a very dramatic way to me as a 52 year old not as a father i don't mean that i mean just as being better at reading than i was when i was 19 and more appreciative of salinger as a craftsman as a new yorker as part of william maxwell's stable of writers I found it very liberating, John, that now I was no longer

being expected to identify with a figure I didn't identify with for cultural reasons. I was free to appreciate the craft of the book. I'm like you, I found it really moving, really moving. So that's really interesting, because I had a similar thing. I was a little bit suspicious. My grandmother, God bless her, who was working class council house in Sunderland, bought me On the Road for my 15th birthday. She posted it to me all the way to New Zealand. Jack Kerriak, she used to call him, I remember. But she thought the writing was beautiful. The writing's beautiful. That's a bizarre book to give a 15-year-old. I voted for you as a big candidate.

Exactly. So I really enjoyed it, but I've quickly, you know, it wasn't Alan Garner, it wasn't Tolkien, it wasn't feeding into my kind of sense of who I was. I mean, it was a slightly weird, I mean, New Zealand high school felt more, you know, I was a long way i was a long way from england but i think i've said this before so anything english for me was was was sort of sacred and precious i have not read anything else by salinger since i think part of that was i sort

of felt that although i'd internalized and really liked holden caulfield it was kind of 16 17 by the end as i said 17 i was reading james joy, and then I was kind of off on a totally different journey. And like you, coming back to it, first thing that strikes me is what a brilliantly constructed, controlled bit of writing it is. You know, if you want to teach somebody about voice in a character, because that voice is a high risk, right? That voice could grate very easily.

And does, I think, and and does and is intended that's that's part of the thing i think you're supposed to find it scratchy yeah the scratchy and the repetitions and it's it's still got that amazing freshly minted kind of the outrage there's that bit where he's in the cafe at the the ice rink and she keeps stop telling him to stop shouting and he's i'm you know but i'm not the funny thing is he clearly you know he's clearly out of control and this time what is this kid this is 16 year old kid sitting at bars ordering trying to order drinks and being turned down for drinks i mean it's on another podcast you can hear me talking about the experience of just recently reading most of salinger's other

work and one of the things that i learned abouter, which you can kind of retrofit to this novel when you go back to it, one of the skills that he had as a writer is he was king of the unreliable narrator. And one of the things that strikes me as really unfortunate about The Catcher in the Rye is many of the young people who read that, I'm not saying they're wrong, but if you relate too closely to Holden Caulfield, you're missing an element that seems to me totally central to what the book is about,

which is that it's a psychological portrait more than it is a heroic portrait. It's supposed to show you somebody in turmoil who you shouldn't necessarily believe everything they say to you, and nor should you believe their account of how they feel about it. And that seemed to me really sophisticated. And certainly for the 1940s, that's way ahead of the game. As I said on the other podcast, I do feel Salinger is, he manages to have one of the biggest and most important novels of the 20th century and arguably be simultaneously one of the most underrated writers.

Interesting though, selling a million copies a year straight out. Yeah, I mean, it's that thing, isn't it? I mean, I can't remember someone said that, you know, Huck Finn, Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye are kind of, you know, if you want to define the culture of America, those books are so, they're so, all three of them, the voice and the kind of the language, they're such extraordinary books. Fitzgerald is a

real presence here, did you feel that going back to it? Very much so and there's that great bit because of all of that old, you know the way that he likes Gatsby, old sport and you can sort of see Holden he's a good reader, I love his bit. He's a reader and he's a good reader, yes absolutely right

absolutely right. The brilliant thing about Romeo and Juliet, best ever. You know, the kind of energy goes out of the play. I didn't much like Romeo and Juliet, but that guy Mercutio, you know, that guy was cool. And then when he dies, like the energy goes out of the play and he's telling the two nuns on the train. It's blowing smoke in their face. So there's that fantastic element to the book,

which is he's channeling other writers you know both in terms of the character of Holden Caulfield what Holden Caulfield reads and likes and how he expresses himself but also how we as readers might see you know I'd mentioned Fitzgerald and Gatsby I just want to read one paragraph and ask you if this reminded you of anything because it really really reminded me of something far more contemporary. Not a book, something else. So there's a part in the book where, near the end of the book, where Holden is in New York and he's beginning to totally lose his way and he decides to get in touch with his former teacher, Mr. Antolini.

And Mr. Antolini, who's clearly a good sort, says, Yeah, sure, come over, come over, you can stay the night here. So Holden is in the apartment with Mr. Antolini and his wife and they're having a chat. And Mr. Antolini has said that he's worried about Holden and that Holden is in the apartment with Mr Antolini and his wife and they're having a chat and Mr Antolini has said that he's worried about Holden and that Holden is heading for a fall. Mr Antolini didn't say anything for a while. He got up and got another hunk of ice and put it in his drink and then he sat down again. You could tell he was thinking. I kept wishing though that he'd continue the conversation in the morning instead of now but he was hot. People are mostly

hot to have a discussion when you're not and so mr antolini says all right well listen to me now i may not word this as memorably as i'd like to but i'll write you a letter about it in a day or two then you can get it all straight but listen now anyway he started concentrating again and then he said this fall i think you're riding for it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who at some time or other in their lives were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Now, when I read that, that really reminded me of a very specific thing, a TV series. A man falling and falling,

whose own environment... Yeah. Don Draper. Yeah. It's Mad Men. Yeah. And I googled it, and I found Matthew Weiner's several interviews

where he says, and one of them he says, at the bottom of Mad Men is Salinger. Wow. Salinger. Not just the catcher in the rye, John, Salinger. The mixture of American capitalism and spirituality and the impossibility of squaring that circle is what Mad Men is about. And it's also what Salinger's work is about.

And he begins that process in The Catcher in the Rye. But as we've discussed elsewhere the extent to which he was successful in continuing to talk about it we don't know yet because as far as we know there's several novels and collections of short stories waiting to be published in the next 10 years which might tell us what he was doing but he knew his territory he just mapped it out in private yeah a couple of bits made me really... The bit where he talks about his brother's grave and he says it rained on his lousy tombstone and it rained on the grass on his stomach.

It really, really hit me. The pain in the book. That's the thing I really came away with. The pain that Holden feels is so intense. I just read this little short passage about him because it's just... I mean, if people haven't read the book, it doesn't give anything away. And by the way, he says, one of my favorite things he says about, 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 Christ's sake. Good note on spoilers. But this thing about being yellow, it's no fun to be yellow. I mean, as in afraid. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves. One of my troubles is I never care too much when I lose something. I used to drive my mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something if they lost. I never seem to have been anything. I never seem to have anything that if I lost, I'd care too much. Maybe that's why I'm partly yellow.

It's no excuse, though. It really isn't. What you should be is not yellow at all. If you're supposed to sock somebody in the jaw and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it. I'm just no good at it, though. I'd rather push a guy out of the window or chop his head off with an axe than sock him in the jaw. I hate fistfights

I don't mind getting hit so much although I'm not crazy about it naturally but what scares me most in a fistfight is the guy's face I can't stand looking at the other guy's face it's my trouble it wouldn't be so bad if he could be blindfolded or something it's a funny kind of yellowness when you come to think of it but it's yellowness alright

I'm not kidding myself I want to say as well while you were reading that of yellowness when you come to think of it. But it's yellowness all right. I'm not kidding myself. Just... I want to say as well, while you were reading that, you know, Salinger's bona fides as a writer. Unreliable narrators, sure, but the rhythm of it, the rhythm of it, all his prose is... Do they all have first-person narrator then, all his books like that?

No, but they all have... No spoilers if, like many of the people in the world you haven't read any of the other ones but one of the things that's tremendously appealing about them the short stories particularly is they tend to feature protagonists who suddenly veer off in a direction two-thirds of the way through the story you you think why did that happen answer because people do bizarre things we can't trust them you can't trust Nikki you can't trust people to tell you the truth right because they can't even tell the truth themselves that's one of the themes of Salinger's work is how do we burrow down how do we find the place where we can tell the truth to

ourselves let alone anybody else there's a sort of backlisted thing there's just one brilliant sentence about reading which I liked as well which I feel it could be something that we could have pinned over our desks what really knocks me out is a book that when you're done read when you're all done reading it you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it that's a good definition of what you want from as a teenager isn't it you sort of want yeah you want a book or a musician or a yeah like I loved I'm gonna come back to this in a minute I've got a book or a musician or a... I loved... We'll come back to this in a minute. I've got a book here

that this was one of my teenage obsessions. That book there. Uptight, The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Botchris. Nicky, I've read this book so many times I can ventriloquise Lou Reed and John Cale's interviews in it. And it gave me the

taste for oral history as well. But it's a similar kind of New York counterculture. Everyone hated the Velvets. Not everyone, but nearly everyone hated them. You know, they're kind of artistic martyrs. They make these unlistenable records. They play in this unlistenable way. And guess what?

They're fucking great. If you got it, as Brian Eo famously said only 2 000 people bought the first velvet underground lp but every single one of them went out and formed a band you know if you got it it spoke to you louder than anything else did and i found going back to the catcher in the rye it didn't make me wish that i'd been a different person that's not what i mean it made me feel so pleased that i had had those experiences with other books yeah and so for me absolute beginners is that that's you know that was the book that set the hair running for me and that I identified with but I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of that experience with

the catcher in the rye it seems to me that the catcher in the rye has become so massive so monolithic it blots out the sun you know and we almost there's some conversation going on on twitter today where actually the catch in the rise a bad book you know what it's really not a bad really it's just that you might not like it but i'm speaking as someone who's read a lot of spent a lot of time over the last 40 years reading at a professional level and i'm here to tell you with a degree of expertise it's not a bad book there you go it's a book that you don't like or you don't understand and i'm not saying i understand it better than anybody else but just technically just on the atomic level of the

sentences this is what i want to say to john like you are more you are better schooled in the maxwell new yorker mode yeah right And we've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Nobody gets to be published repeatedly in the New Yorker unless they are absolutely the best at what they do. And that's true of Salinger.

I think you're right. And I think it's a musical novel by which I mean, I just think the rhythm, it is like a jazz riff. I think its influence maybe is also, you know, there is something in the culture, isn't there,

that Holden represents this rebellious, there's something sick in the state of Denmark. Like our culture stinks and it still stinks. It still stinks for teenagers today. As you say, this book was written in the 40s. It's a kind of, that cloud has not sort of lifted from our culture. And each teenage generation finds different ways of expressing it. It was sort of punk for my generation.

But do you know who the first way, who the early adopters were of this novel? They weren't teenagers. Do you know who they were? Who the first batch of people who contacted the New Yorker or Salinger to say, wow, man, this book is the truth. It was World War II veteran. Veteran. It was people. Really? People have the truth it was world war ii veteran veteran it was people people have said that it's a war novel well it clearly you know yeah because it's post-traumatic it is kind of post-traumatic stress this is shit salinger who had fought on the beaches of normandy who had seen as holden caulfield does his die, people die in front of him,

who was traumatized by the experience, who had a nervous breakdown. It's not hard to see that in The Catcher in the Rye. Some kid trying to get the most that he can out of American consumerism. And guess what? American consumerism is failing him. But he's not even in a position to be able to communicate that to you straight. He can't find his way to tell you. You position to be able to communicate that to you straight he can't find his way to tell you you have to be sensitive to it and my heart bleeds actually for the author

who had to bear the burden of this particular book you know it really reminds me of dylan being sorry we always talk about dylan i apologize everybody but that thing that dylan's had to live with of being labeled the spokesman for a generation, and he's struggling to be a spokesperson for himself, let alone having a whole societal spokesman role foisted on him by people who don't want to look inside themselves and see what they have to say.

So you can see I got quite exercised by rereading this, actually. I really... Yes, made me you know really well you know i'm going to read a lot more salinger as a result of it which is an unexpected an unexpected bonus of doing it well wouldn't it be interesting to hear what be setting a kind of lock listed listeners challenge to listeners like reread it and tell us what you think right because because it would be interesting to know because i don't what i'm interested john i i haven't read it since i was a teenager you hadn't read it since

you were a teenager what did you remember it's a really good question you know because i i can remember a bit but i don't really remember that much of it well tell us what you nick what can you remember if i said to you now tell me one scene from the catcher in the rye i couldn't tell you a scene actually i think if i read reread it it would come back I like most books I don't remember often the detail but I remember the feeling that I get you know after having read it and I I remember this you know I remember the first person and I remember his when you were saying phony all of that suddenly good oh yeah he says phony all the time, doesn't he? And I remember that feeling of he was, in my eyes as a teenager, he was really cool. Even though I think what you're saying is it all gets quite bleak for him, right?

But in my eyes, I still think of him as being super cool. The mood I remember was him being cold in Manhattan, which comes near the end of the book. I remembered that quite clearly. There's a scene I'd totally forgotten where he's staying at a hotel on his own and the bellhop suggests that he might like some female company. Oh, yes, yes. And then he's kind of ripped off by her and the bellhop. And that's a really heartbreaking, that scene.

I found that very difficult to read, actually. But I totally blanked that. I totally forgotten that. Weirdly, that's one of the ones I did remember. And I remembered that and him sitting at the bar. And I remember thinking that the derivation of the title as was a bit kind of weird as a teenager but now i see it as one of the things that i like most what do you think the catcher in the rye is so i'm putting you on the spot i'll give you my my shot in the dark but i what do you think i think it's

i think he's desperately wounded you know it's why he's so obsessed with people who act. He hates the movies because he hates people acting out emotions. And he's not quite able to cut it in the adult world because he wants to make out or have time with. What's that great phrase he uses? To spend time with a girl. He can only do it with girls he likes, which, of course, is really healthy. So I think this idea of the know the sea of ryan and

the children and being the catcher and stopping them from falling yeah to their deaths is is it's he couldn't save his brother he couldn't save the kid in his class it's like he wants to you know he doesn't want his he doesn't want phoebe to see the the curse word graffiti in the school his protective instincts are are kind of over, but it comes out as rebelliousness. It's a brilliant psychological portrait. I felt the catcher in the rye. I think it's really significant that he is a very accomplished reader and, by implication, writer, and he comes from a family of writers.

His eldest brother is a writer in Hollywood. He talks about Phoebe's skill at reading and writing, and his deceased brother was and i i felt it felt really true to salinger that the catcher in the rye the phrase of which is a misappropriate a miss a malapropism misreading of a song that the catcher in the rye was exactly the thing you're talking about john you cat you're the you are the catcher in the rye you are the truth teller you are on the edge saving the children right you can and you can see why messianic teenagers respond to that reading but the catcher in the rye it seemed to me is art and that totally fits Salinger the idea is what is

going to deliver me from the trauma of the second world war what is going to deliver holden caulfield from his inability to express himself truthfully it's books it's reading and self-expression via art whether that's art appreciation or making your own art that's what the catcher in the rye is or else it's all those things or it's none of those things and that yeah it is and it's that it's that thing at the end you know that's all i'm going to tell you yeah you know the thing is if you tell if you tell people stuff what's the great line don't tell anybody anything if you do you start missing yeah yeah but that again you know that and that forgive me but it is you know this is the kind of salinger as a student of buddhism and haiku that's so brilliant that's like a haiku like phrase it and and similar ideas crop up again

which is saying basically i'm putting it in a crass way you have to learn to accept everything here comes everybody james joyce here comes everybody you have to learn to accept everyone and before you can understand yourself you know he doesn't want to be he doesn't want to be scared but he is full of fear. The character's full of fear, because you lose people. You miss people. You don't catch everyone, right? The catcher in the rye can't catch everyone.

I think if you're in a generation that is surely more enlightened about mental health, it's still an incredibly relevant book about depression. It's about all kinds of things, but the kid's depressed. Isn't that funny? Because that's not why I remember it. You know, that's what my memory is. This kid was really cool.

It's a bit weird, the book, but, you know, he's really cool. And probably because, you know, and that's as a teenager, those sort of things you take from it is so different to what you take from it as an adult reading it. I do not believe Salinger can possibly have imagined that the book would be read so widely by teenagers and teenagers reading it in the way that it's not a wrong way that's not why I'm saying it but what teenagers need from a book is different from what we in our 40s and 50s in some ways need or want or look for from a book yeah because we're looking for people who can he's cutting loose from society a little bit isn't he's breaking he's breaking away from where he he's from and if you think okay there's

also on the road and all these books that you read at this well i read at the same time it's all about okay i'm taking my life into my hands which is what you need at that time. You know, along with, you know, the films of James Dean and the music of Elvis Presley, he kind of created the myth of the rebellious teenager with this book. And it's not a myth. I mean, it's just he's articulate. He was articulating something that I think not in a self-conscious. I'm going to write a teenage novel. He was trying to write a truthful novel about what it's like to be 16.

It's also when you get on to the later stuff, which we don't want to talk about too much here, but when you get on to Seymour and Introduction, for instance, I kept having to remind myself that it had been written 70 years ago, 60, 70 years ago. It's inconceivable, almost inconceivable, that something written that long ago could feel so in touch with so many not just contemporary trends but things that have come and

gone in that in the intervening time post-modernism come and gone auto fiction is probably heading out now it fits that bill as well and it has a kind of i sorry i keep coming back to this john but the kind of it seems to me the great unfairness of the monolithic reputation of the catcher in the rye you know the catcher in the rye is a really promising first novel by a guy who's an incredibly talented and unique writer and the catcher in the rye doesn't give us an insight into what it's like an introduction and then this weird thing happens where it becomes phenomenally popular it's like if William Golding had stopped writing after the spire say you know and had not fought back from the success of Lord of the Flies what publishing folk call voice-based fiction. You know, the influence of this book is everywhere still, I think.

I'd like to thank you both for engaging with The Catcher in the Rye in our advanced years, actually. To be honest, it's been really revelatory. And as Nicky said, I mean, we'd love to know if there are other listeners out there who want to share about their response to it. It's fascinating. I'd say if you've not read it, read it for sure.

Monumentally important piece of literature. But as we said earlier, try and forget. Try and forget that it's this monolithic thing. And imagine that this is the first novel by a guy whose stories you've enjoyed in The New Yorker. And then see how you feel about it. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.