A choice of first novels | 22 July 2009

This year’s summer flurry of debut novels appears to tick all the booksellers’ boxes.

This year’s summer flurry of debut novels appears to tick all the booksellers’ boxes. There’s the headline grabber, the European bestseller, the wartime melodrama and the quirky romancer. Publishers recognise a good thing when they see it.

60 Years Later is a case in point, having already hit the news pages and caused a buzz of expectation (Windupbird Publishing, £7.99). Flirtatiously spun as a sequel to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, its author has unsurprisingly opted for a reclusive nom de plume. The jacket announces the arrival of one John David California. The defendant’s name on the lawsuit swiftly dispatched by the real J. D. is Swedish fan Fredrik Colting. Subtitled ‘Coming through the rye’, the book imagines Holden Caulfield, or ‘Mr C’ as Colting cautiously tags him, as an old man waking up in a nursing home. From this rebirth he journeys through Manhattan’s lanes in search of, well you know Holden, some form of truth. Into this new dawn of the great disenchanted enters the author himself, or rather the original author. Still with me? It all sounds like a cringe-inducing undergraduate exercise, yet Colting is occasionally perceptive. Holden, sorry, Mr C, is realistic in his physicality, sagging ‘like a plucked chicken’. Yet he lacks the necessary shift in mindset to create any real interest. Septuagenarian teenagers are a bit of drag. What makes this book important is that it illustrates a heightened cynicism prevalent in certain areas of the book world where notoriety rules. However, Salinger being a veteran in litigation, one wonders if the only shelving it will receive will be a permanent one.

From the phoney to the real deal.