The story is about how Oliver tackles the „usual” difficulties arising in the life of a teenage boy: the first „serious” relationship and the first sexual experiences the problems in school the crisis in the family and so on. He’s not exactly a loser, but he’s not a hotshot either, and his major accomplishments are that he has a terrific ability to come up with conspiracy theories all the time, and that he has an awesome vocabulary.
(Fortunately, it’s a proper teenage-novel, not some young adult book.) The protagonist is 15-year-old Oliver, living in Swansea. Okay, now that we’re through with the obligatory „let’s compare this to the Catcher in the Rye” bit, I can finally say that Submarine is a very good novel. (Speaking about coming-of-age stories set in the 1990s, I would say that The Perks of Being a Wallflower has a better chance to become a classic someday, but I wouldn’t bet on this either – it’s a good book, but probably not timeless enough.) And I hazard a wild guess: Submarine will never be a wildly quoted reference point in the genre of teenage-novels.
The atmosphere, the peculiar teenage-feeling and the humor are all totally different here, and this novel doesn’t feature that unique, unmistakable, poignant teenage angst which is characteristic of Salinger’s novel. So, here we go: Submarine is not the new Catcher in the Rye. If the journalists writing for the Observer, the Independent, the Guardian and every other paper and literary magazine – from whose reviews someone somewhere selects all those quotes that fill the back cover and the first couple of pages of the average English-language novel – wouldn’t feel the need to compare every single coming-of-age story to the Catcher in the Rye, then perhaps I wouldn’t feel the need to start all my posts about coming-of-age stories with saying: no, this novel is not the new Catcher in the Rye, either.
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