To Be Young Is To Know Solitude

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 121
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Ponyboy Curtis never wanted to join a street gang and fight with switchblades, but survival made it necessary. The streets are divided between the working-class Greasers, who pride themselves on their swagger and their lustrous hair, and the Socs, who drive flash cars and wear the slickest clothes money can buy. The groups fight, not because they have personal animosity, but because it’s what they do. Existential boredom leaves them with little besides the fight.

S.E. Hinton’s debut novel, written when she was still in high school, is sometimes credited as the beginning of the young adult genre. Other authors had written for teenaged readers before, but Hinton took an unprecedented tack. She wrote a teenager’s story of conflict and incipient adulthood, not for finger-wagging moralistic purposes, but simply because it’s his story. Hinton refuses to pass judgement, even when Ponyboy, her first-person narrator, spirals into self-recrimination.

The Greasers, by definition, have nothing. Ponyboy is an orphan, raised by his eldest brother, who’s forced to become a parent to teens at only twenty. His middle brother dropped out to get a job, basically because that’s what middle kids do. Other greasers dodge drunken parents, or practice fights in city parks, simply to pass the time. Ponyboy admits he doesn’t like most of them, but calls them his friends, because they can rely only upon one another.

Hinton putatively began writing this novel because a high school friend received a vicious beat-down, simply for walking unaccompanied. This event, and the trauma it caused not only him but everyone who loved him, becomes the inciting incident of the novel. Her feuding gangs hate one another without knowing one another, and fight because it gives their otherwise shapeless lives meaning. Hinton implies the battles would stop if participants simply spoke to one another.

One evening at the drive-in, Ponyboy and his friends encounter some well-scrubbed, middle-class girls. These girls rebuff the more aggressive Greasers, but one of them finds Ponyboy, with his big eyes and poetic soul, interesting. She wants to learn how the other half lives. But since Greasers and Socs never talk, this innocent encounter gets quickly misconstrued. An argument turns into a fight, turns into a knifing. Ponyboy flees a manslaughter accusation.

S.E. Hinton

Hinton never gives specific dates, and few places. Her gang of Greasers prefers Elvis, while the Socs favor the Beatles, which gives an approximate time. And her descriptions of dusty city streets, high-school rodeos, and rolling country hills locate the story in the southern Great Plains. Observant readers will recognize Hinton’s native Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which leads to an important question: is being rich in America’s despised hinterland any better than being poor?

The entire novel asks how an innocent, poetic teenager would handle everything that could go wrong in life, going wrong in quick succession. As the youngest Greaser, at only fourteen, Ponyboy is unprepared for battles against older, larger boys. When one battle leaves a Soc dead, he’s unprepared for the fugitive life. Isolation forces him into soul-searching that most boys don’t face until much later. Even soul-searching uncovers some conclusions he can’t yet handle.

Ponyboy and his friends find themselves in a no-win situation. If they flee their crimes, they’ll live as fugitives forever, with nothing to show for lives that have barely begun. But if they take accountability, they’ll face a criminal justice system that, they already understand, is slanted against poor, long-haired teenagers, and they’ll still lose everything. They find themselves forced into a world where choices lack the moral clarity of children’s stories and simple fables they learned in school.

Perhaps more than the story itself, Hinton’s narrative clarity differs from her contemporaries. Other youth narrators, like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield, aren’t really children, they’re adults remembering childhood from their Olympus-like perch. Ponyboy is a real kid, struggling to come to grips with the adult responsibilities thrust upon him. He lacks mature guidance, only advice from other kids trapped in these circumstances with him. He survives, not because adults give him easy answers, but because he keeps moving when everything around him collapses.

At only 180 pages, written in a conversational tone, this book isn’t difficult reading. Its intended high-school audience will read it quickly, but they’ll also find themselves confronted with questions they can’t put aside nearly so easily. Adult readers will struggle with many of the novel’s themes of existentialism, purpose, and identity. The deep-seated social dislocation which Hinton identified in post-WWII America haven’t been resolved over sixty years later.