In Youth Is Pleasure [Paperback]

Denton Welch (Author), William Burroughs (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2008

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Bascially the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth Is Pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger."

John Waters, excerpted from the essay, "John Waters' Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life if Something is Basically the Matter with You," published in Farrar, Straus and Giroux's 2010 collection, Role Models.

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: Exact Change (January 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878972138
• ISBN-13: 978-1878972132
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars His Own Genre, April 20, 2009

By 

Sye Sye (Perth, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Youth Is Pleasure (Paperback)

To read all of Welch's writing is to know almost everything about him. Everything he wrote was drawn out by deep introspection after a road accident that left him maimed at 20 and suffering till his death at 33 years of age. I recommend reading Maiden Voyage first, then In Youth is Pleasure. This will give you context. His writing style is so simple and amazing. His other novels are all first person and I believe he writes better in that vein. But as a third person novel, this work is better than novels by many other writers who wrote with the intention of being a writer.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Edmund White Recommends Welch, April 24, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: In Youth Is Pleasure (Paperback)

This book is an account of a walking tour of England by a young man. Mostly, it's full of wry and critical descriptions of the people he encounters. There are odd aunts, strange villagers, haunting fellow hostel guests. Welch himself was a visual artist by training. He was a promising, public school educated young man when he had a crippling bicycle accident. His writing consistently describes athletic situations: swimming, skiing, bicycling. Because he wrote so little, though, I'm not certain how important this was to him. As I read, I felt I was in the company of Paul Theroux. Then I'd feel it was Graham Greene or DH Lawrence. He's such a craftsman of the written word. His skills equal those of the other writers I'm mentioning here. However, it's a shame to compare him to these writers. He simply didn't leave enough writing behind him. Welch feels very accessible. Though his writing has become obscure to us, there is no feeling that he is writing in an obscure way. You have an oppurtunity to be the first one on your block to get to know Welch. The fun part is that nobody has to know just how easy Welch is to read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holden Caulfield's better mannered, fey, hyper-perceptive English cousin., May 10, 2011

By 

Doug "El Guapo" (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Youth Is Pleasure (Paperback)

In this criminally underappreciated book a mundane summer break from school is transformed with extraordinary mastery into an engrossing, captivating story about a time in life that passes by with unfortunate quickness. This isn't a coming of age story, but rather a portrayal of what it's like to be at that transitional phase - when we still experience the world with the innocence and wonderment of a child, with adult awareness but before it exercises dominance. Somehow Denton managed to preserve this perspective well enough into adulthood to be able to accurately and authoritatively express the actual experience of youth: the thoughts, and imaginings, daydreams, insecurity and most impressively, the feeling, of being 15. And he does in it a manner that separates good writers from great ones. With restraint.