100 Books, #20: The Outsiders
Apr. 20th, 2013 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerA few days ago I posted Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and inevitably it made me think of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, which is where I first encountered it.
I read the first couple of chapters in the bookstore - got to the part where Ponyboy tells Cherry Valance all about the time Johnny got beaten up - which, it occurs to me at this belated date, is kind of a jerk move on Ponyboy’s part. What kind of person goes “Oh, you expressed a vague concern for my friend Johnny’s totally obvious PTSD? Let me tell you all about the most traumatic experience of his life!”
That didn’t occur to me at the age of twelve-ish. But for whatever reason I didn’t buy the book - and then couldn’t sleep because I needed to know so much what happened next.
So basically the thing about The Outsiders is that it is pretty much the distilled essence of hurt/comfort, even though by all rights the hurt here ought to seriously outweigh the comfort. There are beatings! Stabbings! Dead parents! Running away! Lots of dying! And, numerically speaking, not nearly enough hugging and crying scenes to make up for it.
But the overall effect, despite all the terrible individual things that happen in the book, is not depressing: there’s a sense of wide-eyed earnestness here, an optimistic hope that the characters (at least the ones who are left standing) will transcend their terrible situation. They’ll be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of a conflagration!
The light is exquisitely, painfully bright against the darkness of the story: Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” seems to blaze out of it. No wonder I can recite it from memory, even though I never meant to memorize it.
It’s very overwrought and earnest and, for a certain kind of id, idtastic. I suspect, given that idtasticness, that The Outsiders might not work if you read it for the first time as an adult: it might seem painfully over the top. But I’m glad I read it at twelve: I adored it.
I read the first couple of chapters in the bookstore - got to the part where Ponyboy tells Cherry Valance all about the time Johnny got beaten up - which, it occurs to me at this belated date, is kind of a jerk move on Ponyboy’s part. What kind of person goes “Oh, you expressed a vague concern for my friend Johnny’s totally obvious PTSD? Let me tell you all about the most traumatic experience of his life!”
That didn’t occur to me at the age of twelve-ish. But for whatever reason I didn’t buy the book - and then couldn’t sleep because I needed to know so much what happened next.
So basically the thing about The Outsiders is that it is pretty much the distilled essence of hurt/comfort, even though by all rights the hurt here ought to seriously outweigh the comfort. There are beatings! Stabbings! Dead parents! Running away! Lots of dying! And, numerically speaking, not nearly enough hugging and crying scenes to make up for it.
But the overall effect, despite all the terrible individual things that happen in the book, is not depressing: there’s a sense of wide-eyed earnestness here, an optimistic hope that the characters (at least the ones who are left standing) will transcend their terrible situation. They’ll be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of a conflagration!
The light is exquisitely, painfully bright against the darkness of the story: Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” seems to blaze out of it. No wonder I can recite it from memory, even though I never meant to memorize it.
It’s very overwrought and earnest and, for a certain kind of id, idtastic. I suspect, given that idtasticness, that The Outsiders might not work if you read it for the first time as an adult: it might seem painfully over the top. But I’m glad I read it at twelve: I adored it.
