Book Read: Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
Author: C.D. Payne
Pages: 498
In a half-hearted attempt to relate this post to current events, I write this post in light of J.D. Salinger's recent passing. C.D. Payne's 1993 novel Youth in Revolt follows a Catcher In The Rye sort of formula, in that a young man gets disillusioned with his life and goes on a journey of sorts, and there's some girls, and some troubled familial relations, and so forth. Not an uncommon trope in this day and age. But what distinguishes Youth In Revolt from other nostalgic boy-to-manhood stories is that it completely and totally lacks a conscience. But let me bring in some more examples of boy-novels for comparison(Please let me. I'm tired.)
The novel's protagonist, Nick Twisp, is like the titular character in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole if Adrian Mole was a donut-guzzling, solipsistic, zit-addled, sex-crazed deluded asshole. Twisp is fourteen and has a shitty life that he recounts faithfully in his daily journal. His mother parades her sex life in front of him through a string of gross boyfriends, his dad torments him by dating a beautiful "bimbette" and pretending Nick doesn't exist and Nick himself is pimply, overeducated and undersexed. (You'll see the initials T.E. often in Youth in Revolt---refering not to the more famous diarist T.E. Lawrence, but instead standing in for "Throbbing Erection".)
The book starts off tremendously, with Nick's narcissism and penchant for melodrama used to great satiric effect. For the first 200 pages or so, I have to admit, it's really funny---especially when Nick meets a girl who he's convinced is the true love of his life: the effortlessly cosmopolitan, Satre-quoting, pretentious-as-hell, stunningly gorgeous teen Sheeni Saunders. Sadly, Sheeni's parents violently disapprove of Nick, and this fuels an increasingly ridiculous series of events that culminate in Nick exposing himself to a sex-maddened octogenarian in the shower.
Sheeni's parents squirrel their daughter away from him, throwing her in an all-girls private school. Forced into a long distance relationship defined almost solely by Sheeni's over-the-phone coquetry, our teen pervert realizes he needs to adopt a devil-may-care alter ego to keep the interest of his sweetheart. Enter "Francois Dillinger": one part Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, one part Rico Suave, and one part John McClane at his yippie-kay-yay-motherfuckingest. He grows a dirty moustache. He learns to embody insouciance in a single gesture. He crashes cars and lights things on fire.
It's at this point that the book's T.E. goes overwhelmingly flaccid (I know, sorry.) The ribaldry continues, the horrible characters do horrible things to each other, Nick runs from the law, commits grand larceny, and after various plot points too twisty (and twisp-y) to mention, he eventually ends up living as a woman in disguise. But the bitch of it all is that at no point does Nick Twisp develop any sort of conscience or deepening to his personality. There's no remorse for the lies and treachery he commits in the name of Sheeni-lust. There's no reflection. There's just hijinks, and penises, and zits, and literary references, and while it's all kind of amusing at the time, it ends up being sort of ephemeral and forgettable. Maybe I'm just a girl and I don't understand boners and blowing things up, but ultimately I found Youth in Revolt to be a just-okay diversion that ultimately blew its load a little too early.
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