- \n
- Books<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
24 April, 2017<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_books_freeman_4.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nWhat if Holden Caulfield had been, not an adolescent in 1940s New York, but a modern Millennial? He\u2019d have had an Instagram account \u2014 @CatcherInTheRye \u2014 streaming mood-lit pictures from Central Park, Greenwich Village and the Rockefeller ice rink. To be a teenager today is to have every spit and cough of angst photographed, hashtagged and live-tweeted.<\/p>\n
The 16-year-old Gwen in Francesca Segal\u2019s second novel The Awkward Age<\/em> \u2014 her debut, The Innocents<\/em>, won the Costa First Novel Award \u2014 writes an online diary, illustrated with shoebox-theatre scenes of family, friends and boyfriend re-created in modelling clay. It is read, to her irritation, not just by other agonised art students, but by her \u201ctraitorous\u201d mother.<\/p>\n
She wanted the blog to capture the formative events in her life, good or bad, while as much as possible sparing the humdrum, or repetitious. This was not the way her friends depicted themselves on the Internet but she had no interest in varnishing her life as they did, glamorous moments threaded one after another like an endless string of glossy and identical fake pearls.<\/p>\n
How unvarnished is she willing to be, though, when life gets very bad indeed? Segal has written an unnerving cautionary tale. The awkward age isn\u2019t Gwen\u2019s alone. Her widowed mother Julia has fallen in love after ten years\u2019 loneliness and doubts her right to her late, little mess portion of happiness. Gwen\u2019s grandmother Iris, seemingly so certain as she shops in Selfridges and takes taxis to the Wigmore Hall, reverts to the blind and stroppy fury of a sixth-former when she is betrayed. One dreams at 16 of growing out of doubt and ill-fitting skin, but what if it never ends? <\/p>\n
Gwen, who feels herself to be \u201cno sort of person at all, only a wisp\u201d, imagines her dioramas will serve their purpose, that at some point self-possession will be hers:<\/p>\n
\n
This was her coming of age story, after all, and one day when the story was over and life had acquired stability \u2014 perhaps when she was twenty-five or twenty-six \u2014 its coherence and powerful narrative thrust would be united into a book, or possibly an animated television programme, her own history re-enacted by tiny clay figures in shoebox worlds. It would be an album of memories. It would be proof that she had been, and felt, and lived.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Gwen\u2019s faith in her \u201cArt\u201d with a capital A is pricked by her unfeeling family: \u201ca joyous adolescence playing with Play-Doh won\u2019t pay the gas bills later on.\u201d Her step-brother Nathan, raging when her state-school exam results beat his Westminster ones, tells her: \u201cAmazing for a school like yours where everyone does Goat Milking and General Studies and fucking Art, amazing for you with your accidental, \u2018Oh, I only care about rainbows and glitter and oops! I get As.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Segal\u2019s characters are utterly convincing. Nathan is the worst sort of public schoolboy. His arrogance is total: \u201cHe was not such a statistic \u2014 he went to private school, for God\u2019s sake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Segal\u2019s is a clever, cruel, redemptive, psychotically acute novel that made this reader grateful to have been at school just too early for Facebook, selfies and an \u201conline community\u201d baying for news of your latest boyfriend.<\/p>\n
There is a very different sort of memory-making in Anna Stothard\u2019s fourth novel The Museum of Cathy<\/em>. Gwen has her shoebox scenes, photographed and made public; Cathy, a natural scientist, has a private cabinet of curiosities, a wunderkammer<\/em> of objects, each one a memory, a trauma, a wound. It is a beautifully written novel, sinister and strange. Much of it takes place in the cavernous central atrium of Berlin\u2019s Museum of Natural History, but the mood is one of extreme claustrophobia, of the past pressing in.<\/p>\n
Cathy might have put her former life away in little drawers \u2014 toys, shells, gift shop trifles, a gold Buddha, tarot cards, cocktail umbrellas, a used Paris Metro ticket \u2014 but when Daniel, the man she has tried to lock up, the tiny brass key kept inside the pages of her Encyclopaedia of Insects<\/em>, finds her, she is forced to remember what each object represents. \u201cHer private museum\u2019s purpose was not to escape her past, but to control it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cabinet throws us back in short chapters to Cathy\u2019s childhood, playing with Daniel\u2019s younger brother Jack on a beach in Essex, and a teenage Cathy becoming Daniel\u2019s lover. You want to weep when Daniel picks up a pair of child\u2019s glasses with \u201cWhizz Kid\u201d engraved on the slightly bent left arm. Daniel is a subtle villain, a goose-bumpy, prickles-on-the-back-of-your-neck one. There is something of Patrick Hamilton\u2019s Gaslight<\/em> or Charlotte Perkins Gilman\u2019s The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em> in the way he makes Cathy distrust her remembrance of events.
Stothard reminds us of the unsettling power of the smallest object \u2014 a lead soldier, a knocked tooth \u2014 to raise ghosts from the past. Can anyone say the same about the online detritus of our over-recorded lives?<\/p>\n<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a>
\n YARPP Thumbnails <\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
No related posts.<\/p>\n
What to read next<\/h6>\n
YARPP Thumbnails <\/p>\n
<\/h3>\n
No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Novels by Francesca Segal and Anna Stothard take on the plight of the modern Millenial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}