The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Harper – March 2008
352 Pages
24.95
Review by Andrew Fersch
It’s only fair that everyone is allowed to have their own idea of what it means to be an outcast. James Dean was one type of outcast, Jeffrey Dahmer was clearly another. Lewis Aldridge lands somewhere in-between these two and comes from the creative mind of first time author Sadie Jones.
“The Outcast”, which follows the Aldridge family through good, and more commonly bad, is written with magnificent detail and attention paid to dialogue and setting. Jones has a knack for drawing the reader in and transporting them to the 40’s and 50’s, suburban life just outside of London. And if she had just not let absurdity get in the way, she would have potentially written a rookie masterpiece. Unfortunately, Sadie’s idea of what an outcast is seems to be quite cliché at times and actually ends up coming off as a school girl fantasy that SHE (not tom-boy neighbor Kit Carmichael, as ends up happening in the book) either always wanted to live, or maybe partially did live.
What begins logically with lots of insight into the mind of a troubled boy who loses someone he loves dearly morphs into a weird story about a boy meeting and becoming smitten with a prostitute, getting into a fist fight, and then turning into an arsonist (with some in-between). The unfortunate part is that Jones built up so much potential with the characters early on only it only lets the reader down later in the book when it comes time for issues raised to be dealt with, and they are, but in a patently absurd fashion.
What’s worse about the book post Aldridge’s jail time for arson than the absurdity of it is just how uninspired it all seems. What began as social commentary about being judgmental (and suburban life in general) became a cheesy love story soap opera, a movie of the week (rife with unnecessarily awkward sex scenes and goofy melodrama). Maybe Jones wasn’t intending to write a social commentary, with her skills though as a writer, how she begins the book and the various topics (death, child abuse, sexual assault, and more!), it would have been hard for her not to.
Jones has done several things quite remarkably, most notably creating the characters and then introducing them to the reader in a most magnificent manner. She has also shown that even though she falls into traps that seem either a little too obvious or a little too ridiculous that she really knows how to write. So while Lewis Aldridge and Kit Carmichael may prove to be a little too story-book for some readers, Sadie Jones will at the very least provide proof of what she is quite clearly capable of.