Rumble Fish, by S.E. Hinton

This is frankly one of the best novels I've read.

Hinton first achieved fame with The Outsiders, written when she was 16 years old. It's good; Rumble Fish is brilliant.

It reads with the simplicity of a Greek epic, and carries the same themes—the young hero, a scrappy punk named Rusty-James, spends most of his time looking for home, whatever that may look like. To him, it looks like the Motorcycle Boy, his older brother, who is in the words of a black pool hustler "royalty in exile." He's too cool.

Or, as their drunkard father says, "He was born....with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do."

Or, as Rusty-James remembers, the Motorcycle Boy was the president of the gang and the toughest cat on the street.

To say the Motorcycle Boy is Rusty-James' idyll of home isn't quite right; he's the kid's version of perfection, everything Rusty-James wants to be, a god. So what if he's color blind and goes deaf sometimes? The bubble that occasionally envelopes him is part of the mystique.

Which is in turn the novel's greatest irony. Rusty-James eventually gets his wish. He becomes the Motorcycle Boy, but only then does he realize it's not what he wanted, that the Motorcycle Boy wasn't what Rusty-James imagined him to be at all, and probably only partly the man everyone else imagined him to be.

Hinton's novel is a street-tough, anti-hero adventure story. Rusty-James serves as narrator and protagonist, leading us through 1960s Tulsa with its gang rivalries, dope addicts, adult theaters, and violence. If that's all it was, it wouldn't be worth reading.

Rusty-James isn't an anti-hero in the traditional sense, however. He isn't some dark brooding figure who does right despite (or because of) his inner demons. He's an anti-hero because he doesn't want to be a hero, because he isn't a hero. He's just a confused kid who thinks he wants something everyone tells him he can't have, and only finds he doesn't want once he has it. It's anti-heroic, tragedy without the benefit of glory or pathos.

It would be easy to provide too many trashy details in a novel like this. Hinton doesn't. She offers just enough color for mature readers to know exactly what's going on, and more innocent ones to follow the story without difficulty. It's as near a perfect novel as I've ever read. I can't recommend it more highly.