Outsiders : The Outsiders

by Alexander Trocchi

Consists of the novel "Young Adam" and four short stories.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist and editor. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda, among others. Although he was never published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern (who lived in Paris from 1948-1952) became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962).

His early novel Young Adam (1954) was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.

Reviews

[Cristina Goberna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Young Adam is EXTRAORDINARY

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

mostly, i am haunted by the way continuity between the body and mind, self and other, and the world and person are drawn out.

[John M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of sorts; containing the entirity of 'Young Adam' and several short pieces. It is obviously an attempt to cash in on either or both the Angry Young Man or Beat movements. Too bad that by this point, Trocchi was already in decline.
'Young Adam' is an excellent, somewhat existential novel about a young drifter named Joe and his ties to a corpse pulled from the River Clyde in Glasgow. You sense the author's disdain for and contempt of society. I would recommend this book to anyone; even strangers on the street.
The next piece was entitled 'A Matter of Distances' and relates the tale of the protagonist's experience at his father's funeral and his subsequent reminiscence told in flashbacks. This was used later in 'Cain's Book' with several slight changes.
'Peter Pierce' was a brief, rather insignificant story with imagery lifted verbatim from 'Young Adam'.
The other two stories were decent efforts; one set in a Paris boarding house which verges upon horror and the other concerning a timid office clerk and his female co-worker and their after-hours experience in the local pub.
I would recommend this book if only for 'Young Adam' and the embryonic story which later saw light in 'Cain's Book'. Of course, Trocchi's pornographic fiction written for Olympia Press is worth looking into as well. In my opinion, everything Trocchi wrote has some merit. His was a first-rate mind unfortunately derailed by heroin addiction and an unfortunate tendency to manipulate his friends and lovers.

[Di · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I felt a devastating sense of loss for something which I had never had, and I was tired and slightly distraught, and so it didn't occur to me that that something was a thing which no one ever possesses, for the simple reason that it is something which is created in being seen and which exists only for the spectator, without whom it could never be an object, never tantalize, never be attainable... Afterward I saw that, that it is ludicrous to envy someone a situation which does not exist for him because he is part of it and because it can only be seen, and thus exist, from the outside and always as a lack. A man cannot have a sense of loss toward a situation in which he is seen to be involved because, being involved in it, that particular seen situation does not exist for him."
Young Adam, page 107

[Ayuni]

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