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Summary
Summary
A mesmerizing portrait of 1950s hypocrisy and unexpected love, from a powerful new voice
It is 1957, and Lewis Aldridge, straight out of prison, is journeying back to his home in Waterford, a suburban town outside London. He is nineteen years old, and his return will have dramatic consequences not just for his family, but for the whole community.
A decade earlier, his father's homecoming has a very different effect. The war is over and Gilbert has been demobilized. He reverts easily to suburban life--cocktails at six-thirty, church on Sundays--but his wife and young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert's wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.
Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she is dealt by her own father's hand. Lewis's grief and burgeoning rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to foresee the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open.
In this brilliant debut, Sadie Jones tells the story of a boy who refuses to accept the polite lies of a tightly knit community that rejects love in favor of appearances. Written with nail-biting suspense and cinematic pacing, The Outcast is an emotionally powerful evocation of postwar provincial English society and a remarkably uplifting testament to the redemptive powers of love and understanding.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in post WWII suburban London, this superb debut novel charts the downward spiral and tortured redemption of a young man shattered by loss. The war is over, and Lewis Aldridge is getting used to having his father, Gilbert, back in the house. Things hum along splendidly until Lewis's mother drowns, casting the 10-year-old into deep isolation. Lewis is ignored by grief-stricken Gilbert, who remarries a year after the death, and Lewis's sadness festers during his adolescence until he boils over and torches a church. After serving two years in prison, Lewis returns home seeking redemption and forgiveness, only to find himself ostracized. The town's most prominent family, the Carmichaels, poses particular danger: terrifying, abusive patriarch Dicky (who is also Gilbert's boss) wants to humiliate him; beautiful 21-year-old Tamsin possesses an insidious coquettishness; and patient, innocent Kit-not quite 16 years old-confounds him with her youthful affection. Mutual distrust between Lewis and the locals grows, but Kit may be able to save Lewis. Jones's prose is fluid, and Lewis's suffering comes across as achingly real. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In England in 1957, 19-year-old Lewis Aldridge has just been released from prison. He returns to his father and stepmother with high hopes for a new beginning but soon finds his good intentions sabotaged by old demons. When he was 10, he and his free-spirited mother picnicked down by the river and played a game that resulted in his mother's death by drowning. Deeply traumatized, he found it difficult to speak; his repressed father, woefully inadequate in his attempts to soothe, rapidly remarries and sends Lewis to boarding school, all of which leaves the boy severely damaged. Lewis begins to act out by cutting himself, drinking heavily, and, finally, burning down the local church in a fit of rage. Upon his release from prison, the daughters of a neighbor try to help him, but their good intentions have devastating consequences. Jones describes the unfolding events in beautifully delicate prose, undercutting the inherently melodramatic nature of Lewis' extreme actions. In addition, the teen's struggle for redemption becomes ever more compelling as Jones builds in a palpable sense of suspense over whether Lewis will make it or will continue to feel that there was no place for him. --Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A woman drowns in a pond, and her son is traumatized. SOME silences are caused not by the absence of sound but by sound suppressed, forbidden. These two types of muteness can have the same origin: the psyche, as Freud knew, can be more censorious than any tyrant. In Sadie Jones's first novel, "The Outcast" - set in a constricted London suburb during the late 1940s and the 1950s - the silences barely conceal the tumult. When Lewis Aldridge's father, Gilbert, comes home to Waterford from the war, he instructs his curious 7-year-old son to be quiet: a young child shouldn't be asking so many questions. But Lewis isn't the only one shushed in the interests of propriety. His beloved mother, Elizabeth, is also stifled; unable to adopt an appropriately ladylike, tight-lipped smile, she turns to drink. Even Gilbert finds himself clenching his jaw and submitting when his almost comically cruel boss casually insults him and his family. When Lewis is only 10, he suffers a stupefying trauma: taking a swim after a riverside picnic, his mother drowns, and Lewis is the sole witness. At the inquest, the boy just stutters when it's his turn to testify: "Tell me how it happened! Tell me! Lewis, tell me." "She sh- sh-" "Lewis, you need to try to explain to us what happened to your mother." "It's no good. Look at him." This exchange establishes a pattern of mute bewilderment overlapped with repression. To Gilbert, Lewis's mouth becomes a kind of wound, "open and ugly as if he couldn't close it." When living alone with his son becomes too painful to bear, Gilbert seeks solace with a new wife: a sweet but selfish young woman who isn't prepared to deal with Lewis's grief. Unlike Gilbert, "he didn't seem to want or need her." Lewis turns into a kind of ghost - a numb half person whose very presence upsets the town's phony politesse. Unable to speak much and finding no one to listen, he succumbs to a desperate, inarticulate anger that eventually gets him two years in prison for arson. Upon returning home, he realizes that Waterford represents just another kind of confinement. Only one person seems to understand him: Kit, the daughter of his father's boss and also an outsider. From an early age, she has idolized Lewis, so when he begins to self-destruct she blames the bullies instead of the victim. She suffers for it. Her father beats her; her coquettish and manipulative sister toys with Lewis for the thrill of it; her mother (who quietly endures her husband's abuse) maintains a frigid air of disapproval. But Kit's innocence and sensitivity are so ingrained that even her father's brutal blows can't extinguish them. BEFITTING a novel that explores the consequences of hypocrisy and silenced speech, "The Outcast" is written with economy. Jones's prose is plain, if sometimes mannered. And her influences are clear. "The weather made it look as if the broken buildings and people's coats and hats and the gray sky were all joined together in grayness except for the blowing autumn leaves, which were quite bright" sounds like the opening of Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms." Other passages recall Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and the movie "Far From Heaven." The novel even ends in a classic Hollywood cliché: a lover running after a departing train, breathlessly vowing, "I'll come and get you." And yet, although "The Outcast" doesn't feel original, it's consistently interesting. Jones's portrait of the claustrophobia and conformity of 1950s England is sharp and assured, a convincing illustration of the" dangerous consequences of a muzzled society. In prison, Lewis is convinced there is no place for him, that he is "wrecked." But when he returns to Waterford and tries to resume his life, he comes to realize that "all of the people who managed in the world" are also "wrecked people," that "everybody was in a broken, bad world that fitted them just right." Louisa Thomas has written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and other publications.
Kirkus Review
In emotionally repressed post-World War II England, a sensitive boy goes tragically off the rails. Jones's compelling debut explores childhood damage and the fragile possibility of survival against a background of buttoned-up late-1940s and '50s middle-class life. The heartbreaking story concerns ten-year-old Lewis Aldridge, whose mother drowns while the two are having a picnic. Gilbert, Lewis's father, has no vocabulary with which to discuss feelings, and he denies Lewis an outlet for his pain and guilt. The boy becomes numb, withdrawn from his friends, "closed and not really there." But there's also a well of rage within him which expresses itself when Gilbert announces a swift remarriage, and again when another boy (correctly) describes Lewis's dead mother as "drunken." There's a lot of drinking in this story: Both Gilbert's wives use alcohol as a means to dull their anguish and Lewis too discovers in his early teens that gin can soothe him, as can cutting himself with a razor. But the rage and isolation still build and finally he burns down the village church, ending up sentenced to prison for two and a half years. The only person who understands him is Kit Carmichael, daughter of bullying, abusive Dicky Carmichael, Gilbert's boss. On Lewis's release, when once again his ability to control himself wavers, it's Kit's love for him which eventually--after perhaps too many acts of violence and transgression--allows the young couple to move forward together. A confident, suspenseful and affecting first novel, delivered in cool, precise, distinctive prose. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With his mother dead and his stepmother indifferent, Lewis finally blows up at age 17 and lands in prison. There's more trouble when he returns home. An amazing debut, declares the publicist. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Outcast A Novel Chapter One 1945 Gilbert was demobbed in November and Elizabeth took Lewis up to London to meet him at the Charing Cross Hotel. Lewis was seven. Elizabeth and he got onto the train at Waterford and she held his hand firmly so that he wouldn't fall when he climbed up the high step. Lewis sat next to the window and opposite her, to watch the station get small as they pulled away, and Elizabeth took off her hat so that she could rest her head against the seat without it getting in the way. The seat was itchy against Lewis's bare legs between his shorts and his socks and he liked the way it was uncomfortable and the way the train moved from side to side. There was a feeling of specialness; his mother was quiet with it and it changed the way everything looked. They had a secret between them and they didn't need to talk about it. He looked out of the window and wondered again if his father would be wearing his uniform and, if he were, if he would have a gun. He wondered, if he did have a gun, if he would let Lewis hold it. Lewis thought probably not. His father probably wouldn't have one, and if he did it would be too dangerous and Lewis wouldn't be allowed to play with it. The clouds were very low over the fields, so that everything looked close up and flat. Lewis thought it was possible that the train might be standing still and the fields and houses and sky might be rushing past. That would mean his father would be rushing towards him standing in the Charing Cross Hotel, but then all the people would fall over. He thought he might feel sick, so he looked over at his mother. She was looking straight ahead, as if she was watching something lovely. She was smiling so he pushed her leg with his foot so that she would smile at him, and she did, and he looked back out of the window. He couldn't remember if he'd had lunch or what time of day it was. He tried to remember breakfast. He remembered going to bed the night before and his mother kissing him and saying, 'We'll see Daddy tomorrow', and the way his stomach had felt suddenly. It felt that way now. His mother called it butterflies, but it wasn't like that, it was more just suddenly knowing you had a stomach, when normally you forgot. He decided if he sat and thought about his father and his stomach any more he'd definitely feel sick. 'Can I go for a walk?' he asked. 'Yes, you can go for a walk. Don't touch the doors and don't lean out. How will you know where to find me again?' He looked around, 'G'. 'Carriage G.' He couldn't open the door; it was heavy and they both fought with it. She held it open for him and he went down the corridor, one hand on the window side, the other on the compartment side, steadying himself and saying under his breath, 'along-along-along'. After Elizabeth had spoken to Gilbert on the telephone the day before, she had sat on the chair in the hall and cried. She cried so much that she'd had to go upstairs so that Jane wouldn't see her, or Lewis, if he came in from the garden. She had cried much more than any time they had parted since he had first gone away and more than she had in May when they heard the war in Europe had ended. Now she felt very calm and as if it was normal to be going to see your husband whom you had been frightened might die almost every day for four years. She looked down at the clasp on her new bag and thought about all the other women seeing their husbands again and buying handbags that wouldn't be noticed. Lewis appeared through the glass, struggling with the door, and she let him in and he smiled at her and stood balancing with his arms out. 'Look--' He had his mouth open with the effort of not falling over and his tongue to one side. One of his socks was down. His fingers were each stretching out. Elizabeth loved him and missed a breath with loving him. She grabbed him around the middle. 'Don't! I wasn't falling!' 'I know you weren't, I just wanted to give you a hug.' 'Mummy!' 'Sorry, darling, you balance.' She let go, and Lewis went back to balancing. They took a taxi from Victoria to Charing Cross and they looked out at the buildings, and the big holes where buildings had been. There was much more sky than there had been and the gaps looked more real than the buildings, which were like afterthoughts. There were lots of people on the pavements and the road was crowded with cars and buses. The weather made it look as if the broken buildings and people's coats and hats and the grey sky were all joined together in greyness except for the blowing autumn leaves, which were quite bright. 'Here we are,' said Elizabeth, and the taxi pulled over. Lewis scraped his calf climbing out of the taxi and didn't feel it because he was looking up at the hotel and seeing all the men going in and out and thinking that one of them might be his father. 'I'm meeting my husband in the bar.' 'Yes, madam. Follow me.' Lewis held Elizabeth's hand and they followed the man. The hotel was vast and dim and shabby. There were men in uniform everywhere and people greeting each other and the air was full of smoke. Gilbert was sitting in a corner by a tall, dirty window. He was in his uniform, and greatcoat, and he was smoking a cigarette and scanning the crowds outside on the pavement. Elizabeth saw him before he saw her and she stopped. 'Do you see your party, madam?' 'Yes, thank you.' Lewis pulled her hand, 'Where? Where?' The Outcast A Novel . Copyright © by Sadie Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Outcast by Sadie Jones All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.