If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through “all that Holden Caulfield crap.” In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: “Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one’s interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do.”
Didn't we talk about this when we decided that people who whine about growing up in the suburbs are whiney bitches?
GORDON wrote:I think that says you and Malcolm aren't the only whiney bitches that grew up in the suburbs.
I've lived in the suburbs for a grand total of 3.5 weeks. & that's only cos I just moved.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."