Roddy Doyle’s Young Adult Novel
Famed Irish writer turns to adolescence (from the New York Times)
If the problems of adolescence were not so familiar, one might be alarmed by the behavioral eruptions of the typical teenager and seek medical help — wondering, say, about possible lead poisoning. Here is one of Roddy Doyle’s apt descriptions of the symptoms in his new young adult novel, Wilderness:
She was a teenager and suddenly, it seemed, she was unhappy and unfriendly, and silent and loud at the same time. She spoke to no one, but slammed the doors. She turned her music up loud, talked loudly to her friends on her mobile phone, telling them how stupid her family was and how she hated them all.
As my Irish mother used to say about puberty and growing up, “When children get hair under the arms, they go away for a long time, and it’s a long time before they come back.”
The genius of Wilderness is how it turns that saying upside down and looks at adolescence from the point of view of the young. It’s not the youngster here who goes away but a mom who goes missing; it’s not the adolescent who is out of sorts, but the adult. Doyle does this two ways, in twin tales that he parallels throughout the book: one the story of Tom and Johnny Griffin, whose mother is lost in the snowy wilderness of Lapland and needs…
