Newsnight Review discussed the novel Doing It by Melvin Burgess.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I thought he was very right to do it. It was a fabulous book. Obviously I never was a teenage boy! But it's one of those...

MARK LAWSON:
Confession night tonight!

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
You always heard that kind of thing that boys do think a lot about this stuff, and it's clear from this book just how much boys do think about it. But I liked the fact very much that there is also a kind of responsibility in there, how they dealt with the girls. There was a kind of adulthood in them. It was especially touching the way the boy really loves the girl who is a bit fat, and the girl who is a bit fat is depressed about the fact that she is fat. You get into all of that. It was very touching, the scene with the teacher, how he's desperate to try to get away from her, but he's also aware of the power that she has. I thought it had hundreds of wonderful themes in it. You were there in that chaotic party, where your family's house is being trashed and people are vomiting on your parents' sheets and what do you do about it. It was a wonderful book. It's naive to think that people don't discuss this sort of stuff. I read Lady Chatterley's Lover by torch light under the covers...

MARK LAWSON:
Will, he is 50 next year, but it can be queasy when men that age write about teenagers?

WILL SELF:
I think he has a bit of a problem - I don't think he got the age register quite right. For me, this was the sensibility, the sort of puerile smutty talk about sex was what I remember from being around 14 or 15, and these are meant to be 17-year-old lads. What he also can't get is the cultural reference. Adolescence is absolutely preoccupied by the minutiae of pop music, film, clothing, style. Clearly, he can't get it. In a sense, all hats off to him for not even attempting it. Much better to leave it alone. But I suspect that, for the teenage reader, it makes the whole thing seem exactly what the didacs on the illiberal side would claim the book isn't doing. I would suspect teenagers feel quite preached to by this kind of literature. It's about responsibility and behaving yourself.

MARK KERMODE:
I was a teenage boy and I don't recognise myself in this at all. My problem with it, I agree with Will, is that it doesn't read to me like the words of a 17-year-old. It reads like the words of a 40-year-old attempting to do an impression of a 17-year-old. In much the way Larry Clarke's film Kids was a film about a 65-year-old man about, "Hey, this is what your kids are doing." and I'm very down with them. There has to be a way of addressing it, but I don't think he has found it. His motives are honourable, but at the end of it I felt rather creepy.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Will's point is really good. The sense of the cultural reference and what people were wearing, and the importance of that, is not there, and that Burgess clearly realises, I assume, that he can't do it, and therefore it will lack a kind of truth. Maybe to some extent he has written it for people like me, who are fascinated by that kind of period.