The panic of always living in the present

Submarine

A Novel

Joe Dunthorne

Random House: 312 pp., $22

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Looking back, the hardest aspect of being a teenager wasn’t the acne, the inappropriate hormonal rage or even the fumbling attempts at first love. No, the hardest aspect of being a teenager was how permanent everything felt. There is no horizon when you’re 15. Everything is now and now is everything; and if now is a calamitous wreck, then the rest of your life will be frozen in that calamity.

In purer times, perhaps this wasn’t so awful because the odds were good that your equally depressed classmates weren’t packing TEC-9s in their book bags. Literature has, of course, dealt with these issues for years, be it “The Catcher in the Rye” or many of its recent popular successors, such as Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and Frank Portman’s “King Dork,” or Richard Russo’s visceral and violent evocation of teen angst in the characters of Tick Roby and John Voss in “Empire Falls.”

Welsh writer Joe Dunthorne tackles similar terrain in “Submarine.” Told from the point of view of 15-year-old Oliver Tate, this absolutely winning debut novel isn’t so much a coming-of-age tale as it is a reflection on what it means to be a certain age and of an uncertain mind. Oliver is possessed by the same blunt aspects of life many teens face: his sexuality (especially his virginity), the nature of his parents’ disintegrating marriage and his burgeoning intellectual curiosity.

Oliver also carries an unexpected darkness within him that turns this otherwise funny novel away from black humor and toward general bleakness in places. Some readers may be turned off when faced with Oliver’s worst sins, particularly since they involve dogs and small children, but they’d be missing the larger joy of seeing life through the jaundiced eye of an entirely original narrator. People do bad things. Young people do terrible things.

Life in the Welsh coastal city of Swansea is like life anywhere else, it seems. Oliver’s days are taken up with casual bullying of classmates, his wanton desire for sex and the pressures of a slowly boiling home life, all of which Oliver traces in his diary. Dunthorne wisely shifts from the diary into Oliver’s direct narration, showing Oliver’s obsessive nature at full throttle.

Take his relationship with girlfriend Jordana, for example. Their affair is common in that it’s punctuated by awfulness -- bad sex, bad manners, bad teenage conversations, each rendered with painstaking authority. But when Oliver learns that Jordana’s mother has a brain tumor, he decides that the best course of action is to prepare Jordana for the worst possible outcome by getting her acquainted with grief -- by poisoning her old, arthritic dog Fred.

“Fred’s on his last legs anyway,” Oliver thinks. “I am sure that, on balance, he would be willing to put up with some discomfort and a slightly curtailed life-span in order to safeguard Jordana’s long-term emotional stability.”

Oliver is ultimately outsmarted by the dog, which in itself is an odd thing because Oliver comes across as gifted and talented. (When he learns from Jordana that her mother has a medulloblastoma tumor, he is more shocked that she has used a word he doesn’t know than he is about the condition.) But as with so many bright teens, being gifted and talented doesn’t mean he knows much about consequences. Thus when he begins to suspect that his mother is having an affair with Graham, her old boyfriend from college, Oliver surreptitiously follows her, intending to save his parents’ marriage -- or to assess whether Graham might be a better mate for her.

First, Oliver camps in the woods and spies on the country meditation retreat where Graham volunteers, but nothing more untoward than quite a bit of fervent relaxing takes place. Undeterred, he follows his mother a few weeks later to a beach-side rendezvous with Graham after she’s had a fight with her husband. Oliver sees far more than any child would want to witness, yet he comes away oddly edified by the experience.

“This had nothing to do with tantra,” Oliver decides. “This was cheap and boozy and Graham didn’t even stay awake to talk about emotions. I have sometimes taken longer to reach orgasm than Graham did. I cancel the idea that Mum and Graham are good for each other or that Dad should be a carpenter. Perspective is for astronauts.”

Perspective is indeed what Oliver gleans, and what he has witnessed sends him over a mental edge that is both hysterical and heartening. He is just a boy, after all, and one who must avenge his father’s cuckolding, or at least so he thinks.

In the process, Oliver also must figure out what to do about of his own love life and the choices he has made so far. To an extent this means he must seek redemption or get comeuppance, and Dunthorne wisely gives him doses of both, though not enough of either to make “Submarine” dive into treacle.

Instead, we get a glimpse of Oliver at 16, the cusp of manhood nearly within reach. And what we see is the formation of regret and the onset of reprieve, for Oliver can finally see that nothing is permanent, all things are in flux, and that growing up might not be so awful after all.

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Tod Goldberg is the author of the novels “Living Dead Girl” and “Fake Liar Cheat” and, most recently, the short story collection “Simplify.”