Paul Zindel's people seem to take over his book entirely and live so vividly you forget there's a narrator at all. [J. D.] Salinger managed the same effect in The Catcher in the Rye with an adolescent narrator who seemed to pickle a generation forever in his chat (which some found insufferably coy). Nobody thought his book suitable for Holden Caulfield's contemporaries in those days, or put it on the children's shelf.

Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball! is a lot more outspoken and explicit and is now considered suitable for readers the age of its characters, which shows, I suppose, how life has caught up with fiction (rather than the other way round). It recalls Salinger in its zest and funniness and, like so much good teenage fiction, is an adult novel that happens to have a young viewpoint, but is not so much (or so...