When you were a teenager and in love with books

Last week, I reread Agostino and Disobedience, two short ‘adolescent novels’ by Alberto Moravia, a writer I first read as a 16-year-old and was told I’d outgrow. I’ve often wondered what it means when people say you’ll ‘outgrow’ some author. I’ve noticed this is usually said of writers you first discover when you’re growing up, especially in your teens. As an adult, you might look back at their works with nostalgia, as books that belong to an age inhabited by a more innocent version of yourself.

Perhaps something about these novels appeals to the adolescent sensibility. A sensibility marked by a certain disconnect from the adult universe, and an inability to inherit its preoccupations. It often traps the adult-in-the-making in a profound moral and emotional paralysis — leaving him or her unable to take decisions, even simple ones like whether to get up from the bed or bunk school. It fills you with self-loathing at the same time as it fills you with a sense of superiority, detached as you are, from the necessarily petty concerns of a middle class existence — do well at school so you can go to IIT-IIM (or at least a foreign university), make tons of money, get your own car-house-spouse, have kids, attain a position of power/influence in and beyond your sphere of work, then die post-retirement of a suitably prestigious disease.

Speaking of adolescent angst, of course, the first novel that comes to mind is JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. And it occupies this preeminent place for a reason — Salinger was perhaps the first novelist in English to craft an original narrative voice that was pitch perfect for expressing the adolescent resentment against a world ruled by mercenary grown-ups and rigged by them in such a way that you cannot make the transition to adulthood without doing violence to your own recalcitrant humanity.
In this sense, the quintessential coming-of-age novel, or the bildungsroman, as it is called, is nothing if not a record of a character gradually, and successfully, sawing off his or her own unthinking goodness, compartmentalising, and learning to parcel it out in a calculated manner in a world where goodness too is part of a larger economy of good(s) and bad, right(s) and wrong (s), and favours given and received.

Coming back to Moravia, in Agostino, which was written during World War II, and banned by fascist Italy when it was published, the 13-year-old eponymous character is the son of a beautiful, rich and fairly young widow. During a summer beach holiday with his mother, Agostino gets involved  with a gang of working class boys, and in a reversal of the usual class snobbery, it is Agostino who is harassed, bullied and teased by the rowdy kids on account of his wealthy background and ‘superior’ upbringing. Agostino, in order to fit in, starts wearing his oldest and most worn-out clothes, imitates the rough style and crude mannerisms of the lower class boys, and sets out with them on dubious adventures into the neighbouring woods.

But most tellingly, it is the way these ‘lower class’ kids view his mother — as an object of sexual desire, and possibly an easy conquest — that subject him to the defining conflict of his adolescence: what attitude to take towards his mother, who still treats him as her little boy, but who he can no longer look at as just his mother?

In Disobedience, 15-year-old Luca decides that he will disobey all the commandments of urban middle class adolescence — despite being a bright student he consciously neglects his studies, gives away his stamp collection, sells off his books, avoids his friends — until finally, he finds that his ‘game’ of disobedience would remain incomplete unless he disobeyed that most fundamental of all commandments — the commandment to live, and to go on living, which, in his case, meant to go on being a school boy. He decides to die, and almost succeeds, before life intervenes.

When I first read these novels as a 17-year-old, I was convinced they were about my own inner life, which Moravia had accessed through some kind of telepathic literary alchemy. Reading them today, I am struck by the precision with which he charts a teen’s painful confusion as he experiences for the first time the gentle shock of self-consciousness — when we confront the impossible truth that the world does not really care about our wishes.

It is therefore not surprising that students have been at the forefront of revolutionary movements throughout history. Be it Paris in 1968, or Prague Spring or the Naxalbari movement in India, the youthful idealism that powered these movements is essentially born of the deep introspection that begins in adolescence. What passes for a successful passage into ‘well-adjusted’ adulthood is simply the exchange of this idealism for a more pragmatic worldview. And such a personality change cannot but also alter our opinions of the authors we loved during those tumultuous years of self-questioning, the years before we formally made our peace with the adult world.

I suppose the longevity of a writer is to be measured not merely in terms of whether she survives in historical time, but also whether she survives personal time. Does a writer who grabbed you by the eyeballs when you were 15 still do so now that you’re 30? If she doesn’t, then perhaps you can say you’ve outgrown this writer. But if she does, you’ll consider her works a ‘classic’, depending, of course, on the reading culture you’ve been socialised into. After all, there are also people who consider Chicken Soup For the Teenage Soul a classic. And who’s to say it isn’t?