Book Review : S.E Hinton - The Outsiders (1967)

Country: USA

Genre: Young Adults Fiction

Pages: 136

“Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold...”

 If YA literature was a zombie outbreak, S.E Hinton's THE OUTSIDERS would be patient zero. I have conflicted thoughts about the concept of writing literature aimed at young minds in the age they should start thinking by themselves and most of my reserves come from the didactic nature of the stories and the questionable Messianic intent of certain writers who think it's necessary for teenagers to read what they've been through. So I went back to patient zero, trying to identify the source of the virus, but I found something else. David Foster Wallace said about Raymond Carver that he never consciously wanted to be U.S Minimalist. He just happened to create the style by trying to write the best book that he could. I think the same logic can apply to Susan Eloise Hinton and her now legendary novel *. She started writing THE OUTSIDERS when she was fifteen years old, so there's no palpable didactic intent here, just the desire to tell the best story she could and tell a great story, she did.

Teenager Ponyboy Curtis is an orphan, but he's not exactly Oliver Twist. He lives with his two brothers Darrel and Soda, who are sticking by him like few brothers in happy families do. He spends a lot of time on the street with his gang, The Greasers. There are two gangs in his high school (city), The Greasers and The Socs (rich kids). When Ponyboy and his friend Johnny get jumped by a Socs mob, violence escalates worse than usual and Ponyboy is almost drowned in a fountain. He's saved by Johnny, at an irreparable cost. His friend stabbed the Soc that was drowning Ponyboy with the switchblade he's been carrying since he got jumped himself a few months before **. On the run and with blood on their hands, Ponyboy and Johnny will be forced to grow up quick and to outgrow their social condition. Think coming-of-age, but darker and written in a form easier to break down and digest.

What separates THE OUTSIDERS from its generation of wannabee followups is a subtle but very important distinction. It doesn't address "teenagehood issues" per se, but rather treats teenagerhood AS an issue itself. At Ponyboy's age (fourteen), you don't think like an adult yet. You are basically a child with a deformed body, shuffling and struggling to adapt to an ever-changing reality and you don't know who you are anymore, there's a great deal of baggage you don't have to help you understand things. The world is a scary place. That helplessness, that impossibility to identify his ill is what makes Ponyboy so real and believable. He's not being really bullied. He lives in a violent place, but he literally has a gang sticking up for him. Ponyboy's biggest issue is that he's an intellectual, an artist in a world that doesn't have a place for him and he doesn't quite grasp that. I loved that S.E Hinton relied on the reader's instinct to draw this conclusion and didn't held my hand to the conclusion she wanted me to have. 

Soda fought for fun, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn’t think of any real good reason. There isn’t any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.

Another interesting aspect of THE OUTSIDERS is the imprint it left. Its structure has been and is still being used to articulate other stories as of today. I remember the appalling dance flick STEP UP 3D I had to watch in a social situation, who was just THE OUTSIDERS with dancing...and without any endearing characters. Two gangs, one rich and one poor, fighting all the time ***, a double-crossing girl, all the variables are there. If you pay attention, you will see the blue print of S.E Hinton's book in many novels and movies. The see-through innocence and the sense of emergency is was written with is really second to none and the fact it was a teenager story, written by one and geared toward this audience predestined it to be a classic. Plus, it was published in a time where rules of society were changing and kids were left with a LOT of figuring out to do. THE OUTSIDERS was before its time and bound to such a monster success.

I enjoyed Patient Zero and gained a better understanding of many issues reading it. YA Literature, writing teenagehood, the coming-of-age aesthetic,the power of archetype tales, etc. It's hard to find reasons not to read THE OUTSIDERS. In fact, after I finished the book, I felt like I had just found a missing link in modern literature, that ties the 20th century classics era (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Camus, etc.) with the state of publishing and literature today. How things were filtered into being what they are now. I even read the foreword by Jodi Picoult, or almost. The very phrase "foreword by Jodi Picoult" normally keeps me off a book better than a hundred thousand volts electric fence, but it was intriguing here. I didn't finish it, because she spoils the complete novel in the very foreword. But I tried and THE OUTSIDERS sure was worth the effort. It had its place on my bookshelf as well as on anybody's, to say the truth.

FOUR STARS

* Or should it be considered a novella?

** Vicious attack that is recalled by Ponyboy earlier in the book

*** The latter using dancing, the non-violent form of competition used to lure today's kids into being peaceful.