The Outsiders
S. E. Hinton
Speak
Fiction, YA? General Fiction
Themes: Classics, Urban Tales
***+
Description
In 1960's Tulsa, the city's wayward youth fall in to various rival factions, such as the low-income "greasers" and moneyed "socials", a street war entirely unseen by the rest of society. The Curtis family - hard-working eldest Derry, easygoing dropout Soda, and introspective youngest son Ponyboy - count the greaser crowd as friends and practically family, especially since the deaths of the Curtis parents left them alone in a cold world that would split them apart given the opportunity. When a chance encounter at a drive-in with a social's girlfriend triggers a retaliatory attack, things get out of hand, and soon Ponyboy and fellow greaser Johnny are looking at a dead boy... and the upending of everything Ponyboy thought he knew about his enemies, his friends, his family, and his world.
Review
It's strange for a book this short (under six hours in its audiobook form) to feel long, yet somehow The Outsiders does, slowly establishing its characters and the unfriendly, hopeless world that the greasers have closed ranks against in a fight that they all know can never be won, no matter how many socials they jump or rumbles they prevail in. Narrator Ponyboy is perhaps the last, best hope of his family (both biological and gang) to break out of the cycle that has drug them all down, but the accidental death plunges him in way over his head, forcing him to both trust the most violent and volatile of his gang friends and to see just how pointless the whole scene is... pointless, yet impossible to get away from. The general thrust of the story isn't that tough to predict, with some characters' fates pretty much a given from the start, and at some point I started feeling like Hinton was stretching things unnecessarily, dragging out scenes long past the point. I suspect that the book is also a victim of age; at the time it came out, its description of gang life, abusive families, and both overt and covert class warfare (Hinton doesn't address race at all, save a few casual slurs and a couple characters idealizing the "gallant" Southern gentlemen of Gone With the Wind) was likely more shocking than it is today, though The Outsiders is still a frequently-challenged book in American schools and libraries. Still, it's not bad for what it is, especially considering that Hinton was evidently a teenager when this was written.