Critical Mick

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The Teenage Dirtbag Years Cool stuff!!! .mp3 (9.1 MB)
Ross O'Carroll-Kelly
O'Brien, 2003

Big Fat Condescending Targets Being Skewered

Capture:

the privilege, empty materialism, and superficiality of Bret Easton Ellis.

Cross-breed it with:

that Snake hoodlum off The Simpsons.

Move the bastard offspring to:

University College Dublin on the capital city's fashionable southside.

– Get it off its orse wasted. –

...With a rugby ball punted somewhere in there too, the result in 271 pages is The Teenage Dirtbag Years by Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.

Ross O'Carroll-Kelly is actually the pseudonym of a journalist named Paul Howard who my college-aged little sister-in-law raves on and on about. Moo likes my jokes so she obviously has a keen sense of taste. She also helped record my funky-ass review of Alex Barclay's novel Darkhouse so I was willing to take her recommendation and read the first of Howard's collections of satire, The Teenage Dirtbag Years.

It took me a while to cop on to the fact that this is the same Paul Howard who wrote the best Irish true crime book going, The Joy. The Joy: The Shocking True Story of Life Inside [Mountjoy Prison], like The Teenage Dirtbag Years and the other R.O.C.K. books is written in the voice of its main character. Where Teenage Dirtbag Years puts on the roysh-roysh of Dublin's arrogant privileged, The Joy is conveyed as told to Paul Howard by a terminally ill jailbird from a horribly deprived background. That book really nails the language and outlook of another Dublin- the feel, the smell, the heroin withdrawal horrors, broken promises, blood, everything. Exceptionally killer-cool well done, and in an amazingly brief account. The Joy took me so far into its character that I didn't realize until the very end, he'd never been introduced by name.

While The Joy captures the edgy terror of true-crime, The Teenage Dirtbag Years aims for (like, duh) humor. Moo raved her arse off. Right on the first page: "Can't stop thinking about Nell McAndrew. No time for an old Allied Irish, though…" Allied Irish = Allied Irish Bank = clever poser rhyming slang for "Wank." Over Nell, though? Be warned: many of this book's references will be lost on DFA readers who aren't intimately familiar with the things that it is taking the piss out of.

The dim-witted, arrogant, self-centered Ross O'Carroll-Kelly character and his satiric upper crusty alcoholic adventures are a running newspaper column in the Sunday Tribune. Illustrator Alan Clarke's Ross O'Carroll-Kelly ads appear on bus shelters in an attempt to flog papers. The Trib is not a bad paper, but then again, also not above jumping on the Bridget Jones bandwagon of turning fake columnists into mass-market phenomenon. Ross O'Carroll-Kelly actually attends the Bridget Jones movie premier early in The Teenage Dirtbag Years, which would strike me as way too self-referential if not for the kick-ass skanger fistfight which opens the scene.

Divided into short, conveniently interconnected sections, the book follows Ross over his first year at UCD- or at its student bor, more accurately. Soon enough, an amusing subplot started running. I've lived in Dublin long enough to recognize the big fat condescending targets being skewered, and the language is always rich as the fockers who, like, live up on Killiney hill. The Teenage Dirtbag Years won me over.

The Teenage Dirtbag Years skates Ross O'Carroll-Kelly through his first semester at UCD, through Christmas break (hello, Less Than Zero) and subsequent attempts to win his place on the rugby team to the following summer vacation in Ocean City, Maryland. And, as in a memorable episode of The Simpsons, everything closes right when the aggravating bastard is about to get his comeuppance.

Critical Mick says: Oh! My! God! Moo did a good turn when she turned me on to the weird creation that is The Teenage Dirtbag Years. There's tons of references I missed in Adrian Mole, too. I am a dumb bloke after all…. Which actually helps me to identify with Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.

I found R.O.C.K. OK. My Irish wife and her sis loved it as much as I loved Paul Howard's The Joy.

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

Irate, huh? Managed to piss off another one? Direct your hatemail to mick @ mickhalpin dot com.

This Page Was Last Updated On 23 June, 2006.