Product Description

Jay Golden has an unerring talent for being sacked. His hilarious deadpan diary takes us on a tour through minimum wage land: Al's Golden Donor Kebabs, telesales, McDonalds, Molden's Lawnmower Shop. His namedropping father is high up in the BBC, and perpetually exasperated by his son's lack of ambition and two hour baths. Jay dreams of writing a novel or living in a mud hut in the Sudan with his girlfriend Gemma, but even she is starting to feel he should get a proper job. Only his mother really understood him, but she died the previous year - and it is when Jay starts re-reading his heartwrenching diary of her illness that everything starts to unravel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50436 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ben Hatch saves Jay Golden, the 18-year-old hero of his debut novel Lawnmower Celebrity, from the A-Z humour of terminal adolescence by integrating a macabre twist: terminal illness through the death from cancer of his mother.

Jay Golden's ultimate ambition is "to write a great novel, which will make me a major authentic voice for a generation". This fictional hero has closely studied Holden Caulfield in Catcher in The Rye and has probably slunk in front of the mirror practising the stances of Generation X, courtesy of Douglas Coupland--trying on a series of Mcjobs in kebab shops and lawnmower retailers. He's even got a bit of an Adrian Mole thing going on too, with the careful diary entries, the bemused humour, the cool girlfriend.

Ben Hatch starts in with butterfly punches. Jay's diary entries are funny and sarcastic. They are full of mocking observations: "the only way to behave at work is not to care and not even to pretend to care. This is my strategy and is probably why I keep getting sacked". He tracks his deteriorating relationship with his dad and his girlfriend with fake irony, the timbre of teen angst. But then Ben Hatch lands a punch to the stomach, a winding blow of emotion and grief. As Jay describes his mother illness: "When I hug mum now I can feel every bone. Her eyes seem to be further into her head and her temples are so hollow half a thumb could disappear inside them." The careless pose is revealed for what it truly is--a desperate clutch at trying to cope with all that sadness and sorrow.

Jay Golden is not a major authentic voice for a new generation but his superficial self-obsession combined with his heartbreaking loss make him a beguiling commentator on life. --Eithne Farry

Synopsis
Jay Golden has an unerring talent for being sacked. His hilarious deadpan diary takes us on a tour through minimum wage land: Al's Golden Donor Kebabs, telesales, McDonalds, Molden's Lawnmower Shop. His namedropping father is high up in the BBC, and perpetually exasperated by his son's lack of ambition and two hour baths. Jay dreams of writing a novel or living in a mud hut in the Sudan with his girlfriend Gemma, but even she is starting to feel he should get a proper job. Only his mother really understood him, but she died the previous year - and it is when Jay starts re-reading his heartwrenching diary of her illness that everything starts to unravel.

Customer Reviews

Comic and touching
I was expecting a funny book about the perils of growing up and job surfing, as you do when you're at university age. It was funny, sometimes extremely so, but what I found I liked most about this novel was that it was more moving and poignant than I was expecting it to be. I thought it was thoughtful and sometimes very insightful.

I think the book had a lot of rough edges and that some of the characters felt a little bit lost, but overall I will be buying more from Ben Hatch.

Well worth the read
A book that manages to be both funny and heart-warming at the same time.
You can't quite shake the feeling that Jay could quite easily be a not so distant relation of Adrian Mole.

Hatch ensures that you don't have the time to get bored with the story as it paces along brilliantly.
This book is quite simply a great read from beginning to end.

A delight to read
I really liked this, ended up reading it in a day. Especially liked the two-sides, one minute you hate Jay for being an annoying twerp, but the next he opens his heart and you cant help but like him. A serious and lighthearted book all rolled into one very entertaining book. Loved it