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The Outsider: a novel
T H E O U T S I D E R
by DON WEST
Holly Meursey dies of cardiac arrest and is resurrected twenty minutes later. He has become a stranger to himself, a hapless revenant dislodged from his memory of existence by chance. Struggling to get back into his life, he kills a man in the sun drenched Sonoran desert of Arizona. Like Albert Camus’ The Stranger, from which it derives its inspiration and its name, this timely American tale scrutinizes the human condition while probing the universal themes of life, death, murder, suicide, alienation, religion and magical thinking. The great surprise is that this imaginative little philosophical engine is also the most tender tear-jerker of a love story you are ever going to read, this or any other year.
The question about the strangeness of our existence has been at the center of human life since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, wherein we could begin to see ourselves as decentered in our own lives by the obtrusive nature of machines (what we now blithely refer to as “tech”), certainly since the Great War shattered our remaining illusions about the centrality of human dignity in our calculations about how to live with each other. This haunting and evocative novel has the answer to that question, about what it might mean, in the midst of a world coming unhinged by the pressurizing crosscurrents of globalization, political nativism, nationalism and populism, pandemic, and the general streak of willful ignorance that has dogged humankind from the dawn of time, to live beside oneself by force.
by DON WEST
Holly Meursey dies of cardiac arrest and is resurrected twenty minutes later. He has become a stranger to himself, a hapless revenant dislodged from his memory of existence by chance. Struggling to get back into his life, he kills a man in the sun drenched Sonoran desert of Arizona. Like Albert Camus’ The Stranger, from which it derives its inspiration and its name, this timely American tale scrutinizes the human condition while probing the universal themes of life, death, murder, suicide, alienation, religion and magical thinking. The great surprise is that this imaginative little philosophical engine is also the most tender tear-jerker of a love story you are ever going to read, this or any other year.
The question about the strangeness of our existence has been at the center of human life since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, wherein we could begin to see ourselves as decentered in our own lives by the obtrusive nature of machines (what we now blithely refer to as “tech”), certainly since the Great War shattered our remaining illusions about the centrality of human dignity in our calculations about how to live with each other. This haunting and evocative novel has the answer to that question, about what it might mean, in the midst of a world coming unhinged by the pressurizing crosscurrents of globalization, political nativism, nationalism and populism, pandemic, and the general streak of willful ignorance that has dogged humankind from the dawn of time, to live beside oneself by force.
146 pages, Paperback
Published September 14, 2021
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