Submarine

Overview

Submarine is narrated by Oliver Tate, a precocious not-quite-fifteen-year-old growing up in the Welsh coastal town of Swansea. Equal parts self-appointed social scientist and household spy, Oliver treats the adults around him as a subject of study, gathering evidence on his parents' unsteady marriage the way a researcher might track an experiment gone quietly wrong.

Two investigations run in parallel through the novel. In one, Oliver tries to diagnose and fix his father's withdrawal into depression, applying whatever half-understood psychology he's absorbed from television and paperbacks. In the other, he pursues his classmate Jordana Bevan, an entanglement that pushes him toward the physical and emotional thresholds of adolescence faster than he's prepared for.

Meanwhile, his mother's reacquaintance with a New Age figure from her past complicates matters at home, giving Oliver a third front to monitor as he tries to hold his family together using only the tools of a clever, anxious teenager.

A Portrait of Adolescent Self-Invention

What distinguishes Oliver as a narrator is the gap between his analytical confidence and his actual inexperience. He narrates his own life with the detachment of an outside observer, cataloging his parents' behavior and his own romantic missteps as if compiling a case file, even as the events he describes are clearly overwhelming him in real time. That mismatch between voice and situation is the book's central comic and emotional engine, and it places Submarine in a lineage of coming-of-age fiction built around unreliable, overintellectualizing narrators trying to out-think feelings they don't yet have words for.

The novel is also notable for refusing to resolve its threads neatly. Oliver's father's depression isn't cured by his son's intervention, his parents' marriage isn't simply saved or ended, and his relationship with Jordana doesn't arrive at a tidy conclusion. As a debut, the book established Dunthorne's interest in characters who narrate their own lives with more confidence than the events actually warrant, a mode he has continued to explore in his later fiction.

Why Submarine Has Been Challenged

Objections to Submarine have generally centered on its frank treatment of teenage sexuality, including Oliver's pursuit of a physical relationship with Jordana and his generally unfiltered narration of adolescent desire. The novel's casual references to a wider range of adult identities and relationships encountered in Oliver's world have also drawn scrutiny from those who consider such content inappropriate for younger readers. Additionally, the book's frank, sometimes irreverent depiction of a parent's depression and the strain it places on a marriage has been cited as too mature or bleak a subject for the young-adult shelf, notwithstanding that the novel is narrated by and largely concerned with the experience of a teenager. In the catalog tracked here, these concerns have resulted in a challenge recorded in 1 state and 1 school district.