The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
My rating: 3/5 cats
the outsiders is a book about a group of youthful greasers living in oklahoma, and about their struggles to exist in a society that seems designed to dismiss them.
oklahoma is also the name of a popular musical.
draw your own conclusions, or continue reading.
see, i don’t know from oklahoma in the sixties. maybe that is a place where street toughs call their little brothers “honey” and “baby” and enjoy sunsets and stars and reading margaret mitchell aloud to one another and who recite robert frost in quiet moments. maybe they do gymnastics before what they call “skin fighting” with the local rival boys. maybe they cry and snuggle together in bed at night and hold each other through hard times.
not that there is anything wrong with that.
it just seems to be queer behavior for a gang of juvenile delinquents.
what?? no, i didn’t mean queer like that. no, really, i just meant odd. but, now that you mention it. huh. yeah, it does seem a little queer. who knew that boys in leather could have a queer connotation??
and putting on tight t-shirts that show off every muscle before they go to meet the other boys? and making sure to fix their hair?? no, that’s just what it says. in the book.
these are their modern-day equivalents
maybe this is just what happens when a teen girl writes this kind of material, tomboy or not. i had seen the movie before, so i knew it was about pretty boys fighting, but there is a lot more at work here, subtextually. i have also seen rumble fish, which is an awful movie based on another hinton book that is even more…musical, but is an excuse to look at this:
and how is tom waits in both movies?
but all of that is just me giggling.
what is more interesting, from a serious literary perspective is just an observation from reading this, the pigman, and revisiting the chocolate war and catcher in the rye for this portion of my young adult readers’ advisory class which will meet this tuesday where we will discuss the “classics” of teen fiction. (and i know catcher wasn’t specifically produced for a teen audience, but it is on the damn syllabus and if it makes you happier, i will call this “the teen in literature” instead)
in the fifties and sixties, there was seemingly more free-floating apprehension and fear: the a-bomb, the draft, various factors contributed to this fear of an imminent death beyond anyone’s control. all this anxiety and fear of the establishment created a more pronounced sense of “us” and “them” that i think i blabbed on a little in the pigman review, but children were just treated like smaller adults, really. and the literature reflects this. all of these books seem to emphasize a value placed on the preservation of childhood innocence—staying gold, protecting a younger sister from the taint of phoniness, encouraging kids to act like kids and roller skate through the house and disregard the parental restrictions in this one safe place…
now, the boundaries are blurrier—girls are getting their periods at 8, and grown men in suits are playing video games on the subway. the distinctions are less clear. and a lot of teen fiction today is more escapist in nature, less didactic. teens don’t need to be told to value their childhood anymore because, don’t worry, it will never end.
peter pan FTW!!
this all means nothing, except it is something i noticed. sorry for blabbing on…
read my book reviews on goodreads
