On inadvertently falling into a 48-hour house party one’s hair can be the first, if not the only thing to suffer. I am reminded of this lesson by Richard Milward, who tentatively cradles the helmet of ever-so-slightly lank brown hair he has considerately forewarned me about by text. I am sharing a cleansing ale with Faber’s most coruscating of bright young things at his favourite Hackney watering hole. Milward, a Middlesbroughian, is an emphatically whippersnapperish 23. He wrote his first (published) novel, Apples, at 19, an age at which the majority of us are too busy accruing hormones to do anything other than surrender to them. However, hormones, and other less natural stimulants, are Milward’s stock in trade.

By anybody’s reckoning, Apples is an astonishing debut. Many readers will be shocked by its great fist of drugs, drunkenness, underage sex, child abuse, rape, pregnancy, vomit and masturbation. Accusations of immorality may be targeted at it, but what it conveys so compellingly is the amorality of adolescence, the lawlessness-cum-schizophrenia that allows one to be half-naive, half-knowing, sensitive and callous, endearing and repulsive all at the same time. Set in Middlesbrough’s landscape of bleak estates, Apples articulates what it is to be young. It is Catcher in the Rye meets the Arctic Monkeys.

Still, Year 9 intercourse and pill popping is not your average novelistic fare. Is he aware that some readers may find the book alarming? “I think so,” he concedes vaguely. “I suppose what you’re asking is how much truth is in it? I got into drugs at 16, 17, starting out with mushrooms, nothing too mad. It was crazy when me Mam read it and I thought, ‘This does kind of prove that I’ve done all this’, but then I thought, ‘It’s just amazing how this has come out of it’. It’s not like I would sit here and say: ‘Oh, you’ve got to take drugs.’ But it’s not all doom and gloom and you end up in the gutter.”

One is awed by Milward’s exemplary articulation of the adolescent male condition until one begins to appreciate the extraordinary sensitivity that he brings to his heroine, Eve. Whether it is the perils of period pain, undentable self-confidence, or name-checking the brands by which she lives, Milward has teenage girls sussed. How did a boy with no sisters pull this off? “I’ve always sort of knocked around with girls, especially during that growing-up phase. I wanted to enjoy the craic of girls rather than how lads are, especially, like, the lads in the book – really macho.”

The novel contains two rapes and the subject clearly impassions him. “That’s exactly how it’s happened back up in ’Boro. The girl off her head and the next minute she’s, like… That’s what I hate, that’s one reason why I wrote it, that’s one reason why I do write. All me writing in a way, but especially Apples, it’s an anti-macho fairy story. Especially coming from Middlesbrough where all the lads are on steroids and it’s all about being big. You go to clubs and stuff and it’s just horrible, groping girls and, like. That’s another weird way where I get myself in the character of a girl, because I’m disgusted. I’m devastated.” His own crowd consisted of “bohemianish”, long-haired, art-student types who would take drugs in a “lovely, dead celebratory way rather than, like, being in among all the meatheads”.

Clearly, the author, now a fine-art student at Central St Martins, grew up in a family with the sort of solid values that his characters’ backgrounds lack. Milward was the literary star of his local comp, the Laurence Jackson Secondary School. His father worked for ICI for 25 years “like everyone’s dad does”, while his mother is a secretary for the Labour party. His literary talent boasts no apparent precedent. One older brother is a sociology postgraduate; the other a courier living in Stoke Newington. Richard, the youngest, is softly spoken, and unaffected with a palpable enthusiasm for pretty much everything. His acknowledgements include gratitude to “you” the reader, and he is benignly tolerant when a combination of background noise and accent unfamiliarity causes me to mistake a reference to “cider” for “sad”, “indie” for “D&D” in the manner of a tragic old person.

The novel’s sense of place is no less emphatic than his accent. Does he feel that there’s a prejudice against his home town? “I think because it’s small it does get missed out a bit. The thing that annoys us is that it does get quite a bad press as being deprived and polluted and, like, that’s kind of what I wanted to do with the book was change that. People would always say it was a grey sort of miserable place. It’s as if everyone goes around with their heads lowered, but that’s not true. I think it’s dead colourful and vibrant.” His second novel will also be set in the town. (As with D. H. Lawrence, it will be fascinating to see what becomes of his prose once this umbilical chord is severed.)

Milward has been writing since he was a child. Somehow, he got into the habit of sending off his creations to prestige publishing houses such as Faber and Canongate, receiving encouraging responses in return. At 16 he published his first book, In Dust: a hand-written, hand-stitched photocopied issue that gained him a reviewing post on The Face (today he boasts a column for Dazed & Confused). He describes In Dust as “quite violentish and mad, like, with a few murders and things. A bit Trainspottingish.”

He fetishised Trainspotting at 12, although his mam would not allow him to read it for a year. “It made me realise you could write about anything you wanted and just go wild.” Of late, he has been relishing surrealist writers such as Breton, and cites Beats such as Kerouac and Richard Brautigan as favourites, especially at art college “when we were doing pills and stuff and just falling in love with life”. He has superstitiously avoided the study of literature. “It would be the worst thing in the world. I’d hate to be thinking, ‘God, I’ve used too many metaphors’, or ‘Now is the time for a simile’, or that sort of thing. It would suck the life out of me.” The policy appears to have paid off: within a month of taking delivery of Apples, Faber was clamouring for a meeting.

One rapidly appreciates why. Its provocative subject matter is the least striking thing about the novel: what is fascinating about it is Milward. Already he possesses an idiosyncratic style that many writers go entire careers without discovering: vehicle for a meticulous, alcopop-fuelled assembly of dramatic monologues with spurts of surrealism and few false notes. The cover’s obligatory soundbite heralds: “The Look Back in Anger of the MySpace generation”. Over and above the questionable MySpace reference, there is no trace of Osborne’s bile. Instead, the narrative retains a resolute cheeriness. Life may be a bitch, but youth itself has everything to play for.

Meanwhile, the novelist himself remains high on life and literature. “Hunter S. Thompson had some quote that there’s no better drug than just sitting down and writing, and I totally agree. I’m like: ‘F****** hell, I know something that yous don’t, and it is such a kick.’” Writing is his life now, and he is yet to be afflicted by any Zadie Smith-style weight of expectation. “I’m never bored. That’s what I love about me life.” As we part, this newest member of the literary establishment tells me: “It was mint.” One senses that matters will remain mint for some time.

Apples by Richard Milward is published by Faber and is available from BooksFirst priced £9.49 (RRP £9.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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