THE OUTCAST
Sadie Jones
Harper
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061374036

In her small English village, Elizabeth just doesn't fit in. Her jokes are wrong, she drinks too much, and she’s too free-spirited. During the war she has her young son, Lewis, for company, but when it ends and her husband, Gilbert, comes home, she and Lewis both feel pressure to behave with propriety and make him the center of the household. A tragedy turns the soft-spoken Lewis into even more of an outsider and is the event that haunts him in Sadie Jones's stunning debut novel, THE OUTCAST.

Lewis is just a young boy when he returns alone from a picnic in the woods with his mother. His father, after his wife's death, grows even more distant from his son, displacing all his hurt and anger on to him. Gilbert is even sometimes repulsed by Lewis, who is so needy and eager to love. Less than a year later, Gilbert introduces Lewis to Alice, the young woman who is nothing like Elizabeth and who he plans to marry. Alice makes an unsure stepmother who quickly decides that Lewis is too damaged. The upheaval at home is reflected in the wider community: neighbors, too, feel that Lewis is emotionally damaged, and when he withdraws into himself almost completely, they take it as proof they are right. Lewis is left alone emotionally and often physically as the community in which he lives and the family of which he is a part pull farther and farther from him.

One exception is Kit. Kit is younger than Lewis and a keen observer of not only his life but also the hypocrisies of her town. The daughter of a violent father and a passive mother, and sister to the town's beauty, Kit's strength and defiance make her an outcast, too, and Lewis becomes a symbol of hope and resistance to her.

Lewis's behavior spins out of control, and when he attacks the center of the community's identity, he ends up in prison. There he finds the order and security he craves, but upon his release he must go home to confront his father, stepmother and the entire community that fears and hates him. Shortly after his return, he and Kit both reach a point of no return and must decide whether to accept the roles they have been cast in or break free of the oppression and secrets of their hometown and families.

Jones's novel is wonderfully written, a perfect balance of understated English prose and gripping tension. She fleshes out her characters realistically and gives them plenty of compelling events to respond to, thus giving readers an engaging plot peopled by interesting, if flawed and troubling, figures. THE OUTCAST is set in provincial, post-war England but captures much of the mindset of small towns and close-knit communities everywhere when appearances and conformity are the highest values. This is a beautiful, albeit dark, novel of a town, and its inhabitants, wrecked by war, uncertainty, personal violence, class distinctions and secrets. There remains, in the figures of Kit and Lewis --- especially Kit --- a glimmer of hope that escape, healing and even transcendence are possible.

THE OUTCAST is not your typical light summer tale, but this remarkable and accomplished first novel is a must-read.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

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