Teenage fiction is an interesting genre, to say the least. You got your teen dystopian novels, like the "Hunger Games." There's all the anti-drug PSAs, like "Go Ask Alice" or "Crank". There's all the suicide stories, like "Thirteen Reasons Why." Then there's all the touching coming of age stories with a good balance of pretentiousness and realism, like "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Some books are really good, some are unbelievably bad and the rest fall somewhere in between.
I don't know where exactly the whole teen fiction thing got started. The earliest, and probably most influential, one I know of is "The Catcher in the Rye." That was in the 1940s, and teen literature was practically non-existent — even "Catcher" was mainly for adults. So teens didn't have too much they could grasp onto in pop culture that they could relate to. Then, in the '50s and early '60s, movies like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "West Side Story," which show the struggles of youth, started surfacing, probably as a result of the growing tendencies toward rebellion which were prominent back then. Then, out of the culture, came one novel to change them all: "The Outsiders," by S.E. Hinton.
Said by Hinton to be based on her own experiences from being friends with the lower-class side of town, we follow the story of a young "Greaser" named Ponyboy Curtis who only has his brothers and four greaser friends to count on in a neighborhood where the preppy kids called the "Socs" (that's "soashes," not "socks") who often prey on weaker Greasers and get away with anything. The rest of their gang consists of Ponyboy's two brothers, fun-loving Sodapop and strict Darrell, as well as Steve Randle (who's basically just there as Sodapop's best friend), the wisecracking Two-Bit Mathews, the wild criminal Dallas, and the much abused and nervous Johnny Cade.
One night, after some of them befriend a couple Soc girls, their boyfriends aren't too happy about it and attack Ponyboy and Johnny. Johnny, who had been badly beaten by one of the boyfriends before, panics and stabs one of them to death. Dallas gets them out of town, and they hide out at an old church for awhile, until it burns down. Ponyboy and Johnny rush inside to save some children, which results in Johnny being badly hurt. The Greasers and Socs eventually have it out together, and that's as far as I'll go with explaining the plot.
Now, I first had to read this book the summer before my eighth grade year. I was not happy, as most people, that I had assigned reading over the summer. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved to read, but it's different when it's assigned. I complained to my parents about this and told them the name of the book I had to read. They instantly recognized it, as my dad also had to read it when he was younger, and they didn't understand why I was so unhappy. Of course, once I started reading it, I was hooked immediately. I loved the characters, the story, and I thought it had a good message.
What I liked about it was that I could identify with it, in a way. At the time I first read this, I was in a Catholic school, with a very small eighth grade class (27 people). There may not be as many cliques in a smaller group, but that's not always necessarily a good thing. It's much easier to divide between the cool kids and the outcasts. Guess which group I fell into? So, I definitely was able to get behind a story about a group of guys who are treated as "outsiders" and ostracized by a group of kids who are just as bad, if not worse, than them.
The second thing I like is Ponyboy himself. Now, a lot of teen novels try to make a character more deep than the character has any business being, and it comes off as just pretentious. However, I still buy the idea of Ponyboy being a deeper thinker than most of his peers and noticing things like sunsets more than they do. What sets him apart is that these kind of characters usually desperately want everyone to know how deep they are, but Ponyboy actually doesn't feel he can tell most of his friends about this because they'd probably think he was crazy. And I think we're all a little like Ponyboy, whether we admit it or not. We like to think about things that make sense to us, but they may not to anyone else with a different mindset.
The third main thing I like about it is its message. Having been friends with Greasers herself in school, it would have been easy for S.E. Hinton to make this into an "us vs. them" story, but she doesn't. Ponyboy says right at the start "I'm not saying either Greasers or Socs are better. It's just the way things are." One of the Soc girls that Ponyboy makes friends with, Cherry Valance, tells him that "things are rough all over." And we see through Pony's interactions with both her and Randy, the best friend of the boy that Johnny stabbed, that the Socs are really just messed-up people with their own set of problems just like the Greasers. People are people. They aren't the group they run with. Each individual is different, and we can't generalize about these things. They also make the point out that violence doesn't change or solve anything in this world of theirs.
"You can't win, even if you whip us. You'll still be where you were before — at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones with all the breaks. So it doesn't do any good, the fighting and the killing. It doesn't prove a thing. We'll forget it if you win, or if you don't. Greasers will still be greasers and Socs will still be Socs," Randy tells Ponyboy.
It sounds a bit harsh, but it really is just the way things are!
In 1983, a film adaptation was released which starred a lot of young up-and-coming stars at the time.
The film follows the book almost word-for-word. It does have problems, like the acting could have been a bit better, and it's not quite what you would expect from the guy who directed "The Godfather." Nevertheless, the book and the movie still hold a place close to my heart and probably always will. To this day, every single time I watch the movie or read the book (which I've read approximately 10 times), something always manages to resonate with me, which is what any good story should do. And despite its outdated terms, there are always new versions of the Greasers and Socs, no matter what generation you are, so it still remains a relevant story, which is not easy for any book, especially teen ones to do. All of this is why "The Outsiders" remains my favorite novel, and it probably always will be! I need to read it again, come to think of it...
