Twelve - debut fiction from 18 year old American Nick McDonell about sex, drugs and violence.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 28 June 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Nick McDonell, aged 18, who wrote Twelve. There's a shocking epigraph to this book, "Can we please all stand and have a moment of silence for those students who died, and can we now have a moment of silence for those students who killed them." You know from that point on that it's a post-Columbine high school massacre book, but what did you make of it, Tom?

TOM PAULIN:
I think it's an extraordinary book. It's a very clever reworking, in miniature, of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's about an imagination finding its vocation. It very, very beautifully does that.

It has wonderful references to Hemingway in it, who is batted to one side, and to Moby Dick. You feel that this young man, great talent, he's hopefully going to write a great American epic novel. Beautifully observed, the language, the slang they use, they're not over-egged. This White Mike character builds and builds in it. Again, we're back to the great white whale. Not so good in the jail scene.

At times, reminiscent of the Eastwood movie, The Unforgiven, that manifest destiny quality with a sense of the corruption, and brilliant moments like the doormen in these wealthy apartments looking like minor Soviet politicians.

And then the accurate vision of the way the rich move into cars and limos. These corrupt, spoilt rich brats. Very, very powerfully observed, but my worry is that this young man is now being fed to the piranhas. There's a piranha tank in one apartment. He should turn his back on all the hype, go off to a shanty town for two years, and not engage in it.

MARK LAWSON:
I was checking today the online booksellers, and the hatred in some of the reviews of the public of this book. It was shocking. Germaine?

GERMAINE GREER:
I think it's a small masterpiece. I don't think I want it to be expanded or done again. One of the strange things about is it's pre-9/11. It is in New York before�

TOM PAULIN:
It has a 9/11 moment in it. But go on, sorry.

GERMAINE GREER:
Indeed. But I think the extraordinary thing is the adroitness with which he introduces a huge gallery of characters. There's an enormous number of people in this book, and they're all very clearly seen and all speak in their own way, and they all have their own style, and the kids are all into style.

It strangely veers between innocence and awkwardness with the world, because they are kids, they're teenagers, and incredible sophistication. And all the time there's the adumbrated absent parent, who is actually a father. They're all somehow looking for this father who will make everything OK.

And the book is dedicated to McDonell's father, which I think is telling us something else. He's a bit moralistic about these parents who are into their own thing. I think it's an extraordinarily unified piece of work as well.

MARK LAWSON:
A highly literary structure in that there are 98 short chapters, some a paragraph long, present tense largely throughout. Did that work for you, Rosie?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
A quite brilliant, chilling book, but I think I read it quite differently from you. It seemed to me that what he was expressing was a tremendous rage against these ghastly parents who have abandoned their children and said, "If we give them money, they'll be all right."

There's a terrible, terrible little scene where White Mike is looking with binoculars on New Year's Eve, watching a family of five across the way. This family watch television together, and he's saying, "It's a family, what do they do?" He's given them all imaginary personas. And he's sad�

TOM PAULIN:
And they're like the people in "Minority Report", who are poor.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
They are, and there's another incredible scene with this other girl, Jessica. She's got lousy grades, so her mother calls her up and says, "Let's have lunch in Madison Avenue", and her response to her daughter is, "You need somebody so talk to, I've hired you a shrink." Her mother can't talk to her. These parents have things like wrapping rooms. They give them money, they know their children steal from them, and they leave them. It felt to me that he was writing the rage of a lost generation.

TOM PAULIN:
There is rage, but it's rage against the society as well as the hopeless family structure. They're all lost individuals.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
And it's absolutely moving that you have a child who is so scared to go into a shop to buy condoms, but the next moment can go and buy a gun. What is happening to this generation? You felt he saw it, and he was almost on the point of articulating it. It was a wonderful book.