The Pitfalls and Secrets of Puberty

Among novels there is a standard adolescent coming-of-age story whose parameters are instantly familiar. They include a changing body and a sexual awakening; an appetite for forbidden substances; an embittering recognition of one’s parents’ hidden and fallible lives; and a slow and open slippery search for one’s true self.

Yet familiar though these elements may be in general, in their vivid particulars they can constellate a fresh and often compelling narrative, especially when they are handled with the kind of verve and affection deployed in Bruce Robinson’s “The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman.”

Robinson, who wrote the screenplay for “The Killing Fields” and wrote and directed the delightfully idiosyncratic movie “Withnail & I,” clearly has a sufficient remaining inventory of idiosyncrasy in him, since Thomas Penman and his family are one odd, chaotic and conflicted group.

Residents of Broadstairs on the coast of Kent, they live in a large shabby house pungently soiled by dogs and the scent of constantly cooking meat, where all the good furniture has been replaced with reproductions. It is the late 1950s.

Rob and Mabs, Thomas’ father and mother, are bonded by “reciprocal animosity.” Mabs makes do with facsimile love (it goes with the facsimile furniture), while Rob makes love to a mistress. The pair sleep at “opposite ends of the property”; in between are Thomas’ sister, Bel; his grandmother, Ethel; and most centrally Walter, his dying grandfather.

Thomas, who suffers from the “poison of puberty,” aging from 13 to almost 16 in the course of the story, is an “asthmatic short-arse with big ears and an unwholesome characteristic.” He likes to play with explosives, communicate with his grandfather by Morse code and lurk. Indeed, lurking is one of Thomas’ principal occupations. It manifests itself variously as eavesdropping, snooping through his family’s possessions and trying to discover everyone’s secrets.

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Each of these practices reflects a spirit of questing observation that is characteristic of adolescence and a writerly sensibility. With a last name composed of the nouns “pen” and “man,” Thomas, not surprisingly, keeps a diary, writes (bad) poems, venerates Dickens and declares at one point that he wants to be either a poet or an antique dealer.

The antique that most preoccupies Thomas and the novel is not an inanimate object, however, but an “old rum of a man,” his grandfather. Walter and Thomas are Robinson’s most layered figures, and their relationship is drawn with no false sentiment yet much genuine emotion.

A faded Lothario, Walter keeps a vast collection of pornography in oak filing cabinets whose key is Thomas’ elusive grail.

Like Thomas, Walter is a lover of secrets, also a writer of pornography (and of his own unpublished coming-of-age novel) and infallibly kind, even when Thomas violates his privacy. He is a foreshadowing of the sort of man Thomas might one day ideally become.

“When you’re out hunting secrets, Tom, make sure you go after the right one,” Walter advises his grandson more than once, pointing him, and the reader, to a key element in the novel’s plot: the story of Thomas’ origins, which may help to explain the enmity between Thomas’ parents and between Thomas and his father. As is appropriate to his age and character, though, Thomas must slowly grow into an understanding of how to direct his hunt.

Meanwhile, the boy and the book alike are absorbed in more familiar adolescent pastimes. Thomas gets into trouble at school. He smokes and girl-watches with his friend Maurice. He begins a romance with Gwendolyn Hackett, whom he woos and wins altogether too effortlessly, in scenes whose idealized tone are out of keeping with this otherwise mordant and often imaginatively phrased book (a fortune teller lives much of her life in darkness “like a tongue”; the dying Walter looks like a bar of soap “that was slowly [being] worn away.”

While there are moments at which Robinson falters in his touch, inserting tedious protracted scatological set pieces into the midsection of the narrative, Thomas Penman’s peculiar memories are as a whole rendered with authentic insight into the way human beings, and families, become their eventual scarred, strange, individual selves.

“The thing that makes us different,” as Thomas says, paraphrasing his grandfather to Gwendolyn, “is the damage that’s been done to us.” The source and the nature of difference is but one of Robinson’s many concerns in this highly likable first novel.