A tale of lost boyhood and found grief in postwar England
The Outcast
By Sadie Jones
HarperCollins,
347 pp., $24.95
More forceful than love, as unforgiving as hate, grief unchecked is as consuming as a wildfire. It relentlessly devours spirit and soul, replacing hope with an insatiable rage and confusion immune to boundaries or time.
Grief, as malignant as a virus, gnaws at Lewis Aldridge, the tortured young man at the heart of Sadie Jones's fine debut novel, "The Outcast." Lewis isn't the typical acidic adolescent, railing against authority and order.
He's a deeply wounded teenager whose uncontrolled anger lands him in prison at 17. As this heartrending story opens, it's two years later, and Lewis has been released. In his ill-fitting suit, the same one he wore when he was first incarcerated and has since outgrown, he steps into a blinding sunlight only to discover no one has bothered to meet him.
"His father had sent him enough money not to come home," Jones writes, "but he hadn't asked him not to."
For a father to say such a thing to his son would be cruel, and 1950s England, the setting for this novel, is all about projecting normalcy and contentment. Everyone certainly harbors his or her own miseries, but the fabled British stiff upper lip here is as unyielding as a cudgel, and nearly as lethal.
Lewis returns home because he simply has nowhere else to go. Yet long before he is jailed for arson, he is a lost boy without solace or sanctuary. Even as a child, his emotions overwhelm most of the adults around him - everyone except his beloved mother, Elizabeth. She hugs him, calls him "darling," and gives him the olives from her martinis. It's reflective of a closeness they've developed while Lewis's father was away at war, making Gilbert's return awkward, even intrusive for Lewis. He doesn't know this pinched, distant man, but wants a "proper family" if that's what Elizabeth wants.
Everything shatters when Elizabeth drowns while on a picnic with Lewis. It's not just that Lewis loses his mother; he watches helplessly as the merciless waters engulf her. He's only 10, and no one knows what to do with his crushing grief. At first, his aunt Kate considers taking him in, then after observing Lewis's marrow-deep pain, she decides there's no place for "this motherless thing in her home."
Gilbert is too busy getting on with his life to consider his devastated son. Within months of Elizabeth's death, he tells Lewis "You're to have to a new mother - you know a stepmother," and the boy reacts with a fury and violence that will continue to upend his young life. His stepmother, Alice, is well-meaning but weak, and the only person with the desire and fortitude to reach out to Lewis is the steely Kit, who has always loved him. Her father, Dicky, such a cardboard villain that he would twirl his moustache if he had one, torments Lewis, but Kit sees in the young man all the things he can't see in himself.
Jones sidesteps most of the troubled teen clichés, creating in Lewis a character both sympathetic and a little scary. Born and raised in London, Jones concocts a lacerating portrait of her homeland in its postwar years where facades trump feelings and guard terrible secrets such as child abuse, domestic violence, and alcoholism. Beyond their fancy parties and upper-middle-class privilege, the residents in Jones's Waterford are as damaged and hypocritical as those in John Cheever's fictional Shady Hill.
Yet, with her lush writing and tantalizing sense of setting and detail, Jones has written a novel that stands apart from rote imitation, and "The Outcast" offers the welcome promise of a literary career of originality and distinction.
Renée Graham is a freelance writer.
