Super Pop!

The Catcher in the Rye is the book that made teenage consciousness a thing in American pop culture. It took the insecurities and pretensions and confusions of youth and made them not just interesting, but also appealing. Holden Caulfield—the “I” of this iconic novel (and the prototype for almost every teenage hero ever since)—has been expelled from Pencey Prep and, instead of going home, decides to take his principled, anti-phony outlook to the streets of New York. What happens on those streets—and in those bars, and at those houses, and at the zoo—is also somewhat indistinguishable from what goes on inside Holden’s head. But in either case, they’re nice places to spend a few days, and there’s no better tour guide either. Plus, midcentury teenage slang! Wuddya think!

For almost as long as there’s been a mystery genre to speak of, there have been mysteries written from a child’s point of view. Even William Faulkner tried his hand at it (in Intruders in the Dust)! And that makes sense: having a child narrator just doubles down on the mystery element—because now, instead of just having to figure out “who did it,” your lead investigator also has to figure out the world (and there’s no mystery deeper than that). In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, author Mark Haddon takes that conceit and ups the ante yet again by making his narrator a teenager who appears to be living on the autism spectrum. When a large black poodle is killed, Christopher John Francis Boone wants answers, but he can’t investigate without encountering a much larger and more complex world than he had formerly known. He does eventually solve the case, but it is the other mysteries—how can he get to London? why aren’t his parents still together? and what are the neighbors like?—that are the most interesting. Christopher has his own way of solving problems, but his outlook on life and the dawning world in front of him are inspirational for those of us with less unique perspectives, too.

Dodie Smith isn’t a household name anymore, but households are making a big mistake because, first of all, we should all be naming our daughters “Dodie” (how could they fail to be intelligent yet wildly eccentric when they grow up!), and second of all, because Dodie Smith wrote two of the all-time great books for children and young adults: The Hundred and One Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle. And whether she’s writing from the point of view of dalmatians or teenage girls, Smith gets inside her characters’ heads like few other writers can. From the first words (“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”) to the last (“I love you, I love you, I love you”), we live inside Cassandra Mortmain’s notebooks and get an intimate and incredibly poignant look at what it’s like to grow up inside “the castle”—the grandiose but dilapidated home of the Mortmain clan—and some of the most eccentric characters English literature has to offer.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, but the life of a teenager, for a teenager, is pretty all consuming. Questions about what we should wear, how to get the things we want but can’t afford, and who we are vs. who we want to be, are all matters of life and death—not literally, but also yeah, pretty much. As a nonteenager, the importance of those questions tends to wane somewhat, but Sherman Alexie’s book reminds us of what it feels like to actually be a teenager. The “part-time Indian” in question is one Junior Spirit, and Junior has a lot on his mind. More than the average teen, it’s safe to say—because every teen has to struggle with questions relating to their identity, but not every teen is pulled in two by the twin struggles of both fitting into reservation life and also finding a way to escape. That’s Junior’s plight. But it’s also the thing that gives this book the heft to match the easy appeal of Junior’s personality, voice, and art.

It’s hard to write about this novel because it’s just so unspeakably upsetting. The set-up is brutal (a mother and her five-year-old son, Jack, are held captive by a character known as Old Nick); the slow reveal—provided in Jack’s voice and according to his own limited understanding—is so heartbreaking; and the dream of eventual escape is so agonizingly far-fetched, that it’s difficult to endorse the novel without also damning it. (“Dude, you should totally check out this book about rape and kidnapping told from a toddler’s point of view! You’ll love it!”) But if you just pick it up, rest assured, you will not put it down again. Despite the harsh reality of the novel, the book is also really, really enjoyable to read. Jack’s world and worldview are profoundly limited, but with those limited resources, Jack and his mother (and Donoghue, of course) have built their own real world. The more you understand, the worse things get, and then you get to the climax. Remember to breathe.

The Silent History is a big project in a small package. In the most general terms, it is an app that attempts to tell the science-fictional story of a world essentially parallel to our own, where an increasing number of children are born without the ability to process language. Testimonials—which offer accounts from the people whose lives have been affected by the disease—are published on a regular basis and are supplemented by field reports that only become available when you are in the exact same geographic location that the field report concerns. So the story finds a lot of ways to get into your head and change the way you look at the world around you. Sometimes the results are poignant, sometimes profound, and sometimes deeply haunting. There are a lot of ideas out there now about what the future of the book looks like. It generally seems safe to say that there are a lot of futures out there—but this one is definitely worth paying attention to.

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (aka “Marji”) manages the neat trick of being both very Iranian and still very recognizable to American audiences. Marji’s a cool, ambitious, artistic kid, and her dreams are the standard American dreams: She wants to do what she wants to do, rather than what other people want her to want to do. But as the political climate in Iran becomes more and more heated, the tension between what she wants and what others want for her— as a girl, as an Iranian, and as an Arab—becomes more and more problematic. And after the revolution, it becomes downright dangerous. To see someone who seems so much like us, and someone who lives in a culture so much like ours, suffer—and watch others suffer—at the hands of religious extremism and totalitarianism, offers a rude awakening to the dangers that endure in the world that surrounds us, in the world that we all share.

The Invisible Man is about a man who is literally invisible. It was also, once upon a time, a movie starring (“starring”) Chevy Chase (the man, not the Maryland). Invisible Man, on the other hand, is about a man who is figuratively invisible—a black man living underground in New York City at the middle of the last century. In addition to being one of America’s most celebrated authors, Ellison was an immensely talented jazz musician, and in keeping with that tradition, he drew heavily from the literary past in the construction and style of his novel, but he also created something entirely new. His invisible man, for his part, has a past, but he has given up on the future. What he is left with is a story and a voice. That voice is what keeps us reading even when the story becomes unbearable—during the battle royal scene, for instance, or in any of the book’s numberless betrayals. We travel with the Invisible Man deep into the bowels of American life, and because his voice is so vivid, it’s hard to resist seeing his world, even when we look out at our own today. Throughout his life, Ellison was badgered about the production of a new literary work to match Invisible Man; but maybe that’s because his work was already done.

Each of Cloud Atlas’s six different story lines comes to us via a different narrator, writing in a different time and working within a different literary genre (spanning from dystopian sci-fi to conspiracy thrillers to literary fiction); but the worlds that David Mitchell builds up out of these different moods are so complete that it doesn’t really matter where the story goes (although the story’s fun, too). When you’re in an eighteenth-century seafaring vessel, you feel like you’re in the eighteenth century—and manners may be your only way out (until there’s another way). And when you’re in the distant, distant future, and blood-soaked barbarians are attacking you from every side, you feel like anarchy is the only real option (until it’s not). It keeps you reading because you always want to know what happens next—but in the end, ironically, it’s not the plot that matters; it’s the people . . . and the words . . . and the worlds. It’s fun to be there, because it’s fun to be these people. It’s fun to be them even though they are, in sequence, poisoned, manipulated, assassinated, falsely imprisoned, mock-trial’d, and hunted for sport. But whatevs. Humans are a tough bunch, y’all!

Things that are hard to imagine: black holes, a trustworthy scorpion, an internet without advertisements, and a world without other people in it. I Am Legend doesn’t concern itself with most of those items, but it certainly takes up the challenge of imagining the last item on the list, painting a vivid picture of Robert Neville’s life on Earth now that all the other people are gone. It is a lonely life, and one sequence where he attempts to get a stray dog (“stray” is a little superfluous at this point, I guess) to trust him is particularly affecting—especially since every time the dog wanders off, Neville imagines that he’s going to be eaten by the vampires.

Oh yeah, the vampires. Did I neglect to mention that? The humans are gone because the vampires (vampire-zombie hybrids, really) have completely taken over. Neville is the last man standing, and because he needs something to do besides drink and barricade himself inside his house, he attempts to figure out how the vampire-zombie disease works, how the vampire-zombies can be defeated, and how he, on his own, can actually defeat them. The Will Smith movie adaptation did a great job of portraying the loneliness and isolation of the book, but the procedural survival aspect was lost, as was the amazing conclusion, where you realize that—well, suffice it to say that there’s something especially impressive about a final twist that doesn’t rely on any new information or events. Check it out.

GAIN SOME PERSPECTIVEREAD A BOOK AND TRY ONANOTHER HUMAN BEING

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