That Was Then, This Is Now is one of Hinton’s— and young adult fiction’s—classic comingof- age stories. Hinton stages her story amidst the gritty street background that characterized many of her young adult books, and employed the same realistic themes that helped to change the tone of young adult fiction in general. As Hinton discussed in Speaking for Ourselves, when she was a teenager, “there wasn’t much to read except Mary Jane Goes to the Prom, and I couldn’t stand to read that stuff.” Instead, Hinton’s teenagers face adult situations, make adult decisions, and deal with adult consequences. In That Was Then, This Is Now, the teenager is Bryon Douglas, who makes the transformation from a carefree kid to a mature, responsible, but emotionally devastated adult. Although many factors influence Bryon’s transformation, it is the symbolic death of Charlie that provides the ultimate catalyst.

In the beginning of the story, Bryon is a street kid, whose rough lifestyle is established with the first line of the book: “Mark and me went down to the bar/pool hall about two or three blocks from where we lived with the sole intention of making some money.” Throughout the rest of the first chapter, Bryon tells the reader the other ways he lives his life besides hustling pool, such as how he treats girls, “telling them I loved them and junk, when I didn’t. I had a rep as a lady-killer—a hustler.” Bryon also demonstrates his tendency to fight with other kids, when he and Mark gladly come to M&M’s rescue, after M&M gets jumped by Curly Shepard and his gang. “Me and Mark looked at each other, and Mark flashed me a grin. We both liked fights. We ran out and jumped on them.” Most important, Bryon is tied to his foster brother, another street kid: “Mark was my best buddy and I loved him like a brother.” At this point, Bryon is starting to have some minor doubts about his lifestyle, such as when he takes M&M’s cue and starts to realize that fights are not all that great: “I didn’t feel quite as good as I had before. I was thinking about what M&M had said about beating up people because they were different.” However, Bryon is only starting to have these feelings, and even after he remembers his own bad experiences with being mugged, he still notes, “I liked fights.”

At the end of the story, however, Bryon has changed. He has turned in his “brother,” Mark, to the authorities for drug dealing and is very confused about why he does this. “Why had I turned on Mark? What had I done to him?” Bryon quickly finds that his actions have a profound effect on his emotional state. When Cathy comes to visit, he is distant, cold, and deliberately hurtful to her. As he notes, “I wondered impersonally why I didn’t love her any more. But it didn’t seem to matter.” Furthermore, Bryon is no longer living the carefree lifestyle he had, picking fights and causing other types of trouble. Instead, he follows a mature, responsible life routine. “I went to school and went to work and went home and studied.” He performs this routine without thought and gets “straight A’s” and a promotion, “from sack boy to clerk. I didn’t come to work hung over and I didn’t give the manager any lip.”

So what causes this huge transformation? Although many factors contribute to Bryon’s change, it is the death of his friend Charlie that sets the change in motion. In fact, Charlie’s death is strategically placed within the novel, almost exactly halfway through the narrative, dividing the book into two equal parts, the period in Bryon’s life before Charlie’s death and the period after Charlie’s death. This is not an accident on Hinton’s part. As Jay Daly said in his book, Presenting S. E. Hinton, “That Was Then, This Is Now is, in nearly everyone’s view, a much more disciplined novel than The Outsiders.” Daly notes that Hinton used this discipline “to fashion a well-crafted book.” Looking at the book with this fact in mind, it is easy to see that Hinton deliberately places Charlie’s death at the center of the book, providing a clear pivotal point for Bryon’s emotional journey.

Even before his death, Charlie is an important person in Bryon’s life, since he is the only adultlike influence that Bryon has; Bryon and Mark live in a world that is relatively free from adults. The Nation reviewer, Michael Malone, noted this trend in Hinton’s books: “Rather than ask her characters to cope with adults, wryly or otherwise, Hinton either removes them or removes their authority.” These two situations are definitely true in That Was Then, This Is Now. Mark loses his parents at an early age: “His parents had killed each other in a drunken fight when he was nine years old and he saw it all.” Following this tragic event, young Mark knows, “I can go live with Bryon and his old lady.” However, for much of the story, Bryon’s “old lady” is not around either, since she’s in the hospital with an unnamed illness.

Even when Bryon’s mother is around, however, her style of parenting is very hands-off. She is a compassionate person who is known for her tendency to take in strays, but she does not exhibit much concern for her sons’ actions, even when they are hurt. As Bryon notes, “That was a good thing about Mom—she’d cry over a dog with a piece of glass in his paw but remained unhysterical when we came home clobbered.” Malone also noted this “remarkable lack of maternal responsibility or even curiosity.” Bryon’s mother is not around when Bryon and Mark make their biggest decisions, and she is unaware of the types of activities that they pursue in general. Bryon says that this is normal: “Parents never know what all their kids do. Not in the old days, not now, not tomorrow. It’s a law.” In fact, at the end of the story, after Bryon has made his life-changing choice to turn in Mark to the police for his drug dealing, Bryon notes that it is at this point that “Mom woke up. She didn’t know what was going on. She could only stand helpless in the kitchen doorway.” This line underscores the lack of parental involvement and authority in the story.

In this world that is relatively isolated from adults, the only true parental figure, somebody who has a real influence over Bryon, is Charlie, the twenty-two-year-old bar owner. Although Charlie is only six years older than Bryon, he is the one who gives Bryon fatherly advice, encouraging Bryon to look inside himself for answers, such as when Bryon asks him for a job and he turns him down: “You just think about it, and I think you’ll come up with the reason why you haven’t got a job before now.” Charlie also gives Bryon other reasons for not giving him a job, such as Charlie’s concern for Bryon’s safety: “Besides, Bryon, it gets rough in here late at night . . . you’d better just take my word for it that you’d be better off someplace else.” For this last reason, it makes sense that Charlie is the one who makes the ultimate sacrifice— his life—when he saves Mark and Bryon from the two Texans. When Bryon and Mark start to come out of the alley, Charlie scolds them, as a parent might, saying, “I hope you two learned something from this.” However, when one of the Texans uses this distraction as an opportunity to dive for his gun, Charlie’s first instinct is to protect Bryon and Mark. He drops his shotgun and, as Bryon notes, “slammed both of us to the ground.”

Charlie’s death symbolizes the death of Bryon’s own childhood; without Charlie, Bryon’s only adult-like influence, Bryon must start to think on his own. Charlie’s death is also the first time that Bryon has had to face a major consequence from his actions. Bryon thinks to himself: “I couldn’t get it out of my mind, Charlie’s warning us about hustling.” Mark, who has always related to him before, does not understand Bryon’s guilt over Charlie’s death: “We didn’t blow nothing, Bryon. Things just happen, that’s all there is to it.” Bryon looks elsewhere for solace, to Cathy. “I could talk to her about anything, talk to her better than I could anyone, even Mark.” As a result, Bryon gets put in the middle of a battle between Mark and Cathy. Mark wants Bryon to be the same carefree kid he’s always been, causing trouble with Mark and never thinking about the consequences. Cathy, on the other hand, understands Bryon’s impulse to be a mature adult, even telling him at one point that she thinks he would “be a good influence” on her brother, M&M, who she suspects is starting to use drugs.

Bryon feels this struggle between Mark and Cathy, between childhood and maturity. Bryon and Mark talk about this one night when Bryon is drunk, and Bryon asks Mark why bad things happen to people. Mark warns Bryon: “You start wonderin’ why, and you get old. Lately, I felt like you were leavin’ me, man.” Bryon is getting old. He is starting to see, as with Charlie’s death, that his actions have consequences, and this knowledge of responsibility influences his reactions to other events. For example, he feels bad that they picked up his ex-girlfriend, Angela, and cut off her hair in a vengeful act, something that in his old life, he might not have had a problem with: “Poor Angel—we shoulda left her alone, Mark. That was a mean thing to do, cut off her hair like that.” This same mature awareness of responsibility for one’s actions influences Bryon’s decision to turn Mark in when he finds Mark’s drugs and, in a flash of insight, realizes that “M&M was in the hospital, and maybe he was messed up for life—and Mark was selling the stuff that made him that way.” Bryon further realizes that “Mark had absolutely no concept of what was right and what was wrong” and feels he has no choice but to turn him in. Bryon’s mother, in one of her few “motherly” statements, tells him at the end of the book that “what you did was for his own good.” Nevertheless, this act renders Bryon emotionally dead at sixteen, wondering if things could have turned out differently. As Michael Cart noted:

The phrase ‘if only’ is perhaps the most bittersweet in the language, and Miss Hinton uses it skillfully to underline her theme: growth can be a dangerous process. As Bryon moves toward maturity he faces the dangers of the emotional vacuum that waits to be filled after loss of innocence.

This cataclysmic ending underscores, more than anything else, that Bryon is now an adult who must face the consequences of his actions. Says Sheryl B. Andrews, “Bryon’s final commitment to himself and to his future is harshly and realistically underlined in an ending that offers no pat promises.” This harsh ending has prompted questions from Hinton’s teenage readers. In his article, “On Tulsa’s Mean Streets,” Newsweek’s Gene Lyons noted of Hinton’s fan mail, “Sometimes correspondents are moved to ask things like . . . ‘Can’t you write another book and get Bryon and Mark back together?’” However, in the adult world, as Bryon’s story illustrates, consequences must be acknowledged and dealt with. Charlie’s death and the emotional change it inspires in Bryon cannot be undone; the broken relationship between Bryon and Mark cannot be repaired.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on That Was Then, This Is Now, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

S. E. Hinton’s That Was Then, This Is Now is a coming of age novel set during the Vietnam War around the late 1960s. It takes place in an unnamed city very much like Tulsa, Oklahoma, that shares significant characteristics with Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, set in the vicinity of the fictional Thalia, Texas, during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Following the lives and trials of teenagers as they progress through cycles of hope and loss, both novels provide details of setting, and strong plots, that give readers sympathetic access to character in times of crisis. Both have been made into movies, and both leave a profound sense of sadness about the human condition.

The settings to That Was Then, This Is Now and The Last Picture Show are clearly laid out as places where teenagers have a difficult time finding something wholesome to do. In both cases, driving around aimlessly, playing pool, drinking, and looking for trouble are common forms of entertainment. Lack of money plays a large role in both, too, and the main male teenage characters have to spend a considerable amount of their time scrounging, scamming, or working petty jobs to earn enough for dates and living expenses. Even transportation requires cooperation and careful planning, with Mark and Bryon having to borrow their friend Charlie’s car from time to time in That Was Then, This Is Now and Sonny and Duane having to share use of their friend Sam the Lion’s pickup truck, often having to negotiate and alternate dating times because of this limitation, in The Last Picture Show. Mark and Bryon have a somewhat larger playing field because they live in a moderate sized city, whereas Sonny and Duane live in the much smaller Thalia in West Texas, a windswept little town that is surrounded by oil fields and vast empty spaces. Also, Mark and Bryon, at the time of Hinton’s novel, live in a period nearly twenty years after the setting for McMurtry’s, and they are exposed to drugs and hippie culture, including marijuana, pills, and LSD; alcohol, though, is common to both settings and easily available to resourceful teenagers, despite legal statutes aimed at limiting access to it. The drugs in That Was Then, This Is Now are a more serious matter in terms of what happens to characters. This is particularly evident in the overdose, hospitalization, and clear psychological damage of Cathy Carlson’s thirteen-yearold brother M&M (known to his hippie friends as Baby Freak), and in Bryon calling the police and turning in Mark, his brotherly best friend, for pushing pills. Finally, sexual mores and situations are more frankly discussed in McMurtry’s novel, partly because Sonny and Duane are seniors and then high school graduates during the course of the plot, whereas Mark and Bryon are sophomore or juniors (it is not specified); and partly because drugs provide the major plot rationale that substitutes for sex in Hinton’s novel.

Supporting male characters play pivotal roles in both That Was Then, This Is Now and The Last Picture Show. Most important are Charlie and M&M in the former and Sam the Lion and Billy in the latter. They are very special people. Charlie, only twenty-two, runs a bar and pool hall and serves as a mentor and protector for Bryon and Mark. Sam the Lion is much older and runs a pool hall and owns other properties in Thalia; he also takes care of Billy, a retarded orphan, and Sonny, his friend, and to a lesser extent, Duane, whose father is an alcoholic. Like Charlie, Sam is well-respected, has a rough background himself, and does his best to guide the young men who look up to him. Coincidentally, or in a possible homage to McMurtry, Hinton has Bryon, the narrator of That Was Then, This Is Now, repeatedly describe Mark as having the qualities of a lion, referring to his “lion-like grin,” and to him acting “like a teased lion who’s had enough,” like “a stray lion;” once he outright calls him “Mark the lion.” Aside from this, there is a more direct parallel in that the demise of Charlie and Sam the Lion represent major turning points in each book, accelerating changes in Hinton’s Bryon and Mark and in McMurtry’s Sonny and Billy respectively. Charlie, armed with a sawed off shotgun, is killed while trying to drive off two Texans who are threatening, at gunpoint, to beat up Bryon and Mark for having hustled them at pool. In The Last Picture Show, Sam the Lion dies suddenly of natural causes only days after giving Sonny and Duane extra money and his blessings for a trip they take to Mexico in the pickup truck; they learn of his death almost immediately upon their return. As Sonny observes, nothing is the same once Sam dies. Sonny receives Sam’s pool hall and charge of Billy from Sam the Lion’s will, while in That Was Then, This is Now, Bryon and Mark are given Charlie’s car by the local authorities where they live. Soon after the deaths of these strong male role models, respective female characters complicate and destabilize Bryon’s, Mark’s, Sonny’s, and Duane’s lives further, leading eventually to complete breaks in all of their relationships.

Though there are more than two important female characters in both That Was Then, This Is Now and The Last Picture Show, two are crucial catalysts for change: Cathy in the former and Jacy in the latter. Duane and Sonny literally come to blows over Jacy, with Duane crashing a beer bottle over Sonny’s head. In Hinton’s novel, Mark has a beer bottle smashed over his head, too, in a fight set up by one of Bryon’s past girlfriends (Angela), but it is when Bryon falls in love with Cathy that Mark truly starts losing Bryon’s friendship and their shared feeling of brotherhood. Jacy is beautiful, flirtatious, and, the only child of oil-rich parents. She becomes a femme fatale (a seductive and disastrous girlfriend) for both Duane and Sonny. She breaks up with Duane, who eventually goes off to work as a “roughneck” in the oil fields hoping to win her back, only to learn of her dating Sonny in his absence. It is when he returns and confronts Sonny about this that they have their climactic street brawl. Sonny subsequently marries her, only to have her arrange their elopement’s almost immediate annulment, to his utter confusion and devastation. Sonny joins the Army and climbs on a bus, heading for military service during the Korean War. With Jacy gone, Duane first makes a sort of sad peace with Sonny (for they are veterans of the same love and war with Jacy), letting him drive the car he bought with oil field wages while he is away. Cathy is very different from Jacy, but the end result is just as disastrous for all involved. Cathy comes from a large lower middle class family, one that is concerned and loving toward their children. Bryon is the first person she seriously dates, and they fall in love mutually. Younger than Jacy, Cathy is more mature for her age and has set her heart on college and a stable life. She comes to think of Mark as a bad influence on Bryon, and Mark, therefore, comes to resent her and feels hurt as her influence gains power over Bryon. Tension builds between the two, and both Bryon and Mark begin to feel a gulf developing between them. Bryon begins to change, to care about Cathy and her little brother M&M. When Mark tries to hold on to what they had, Bryon feels remorse and guilt. Unlike Jacy, Cathy is no femme fatale. Instead, she vocalizes her strong opinions about right and wrong and renders bluntly honest observations that quickly annoy Mark and eventually annoy Bryon as well.

With Cathy profoundly affecting the relationship between Bryon and Mark in That Was Then, This Is Now and Jacy doing the same to Sonny and Duane in The Last Picture Show, both novels head in the same parallel direction, ending in breakups in the relationships all of these friends. The strong male role models Charlie and Sam the Lion have already died; now the more gentle and pitiful characters M&M (Baby Freak) and Billy suffer respective disasters that propel Sonny (in The Last Picture Show) and Bryon (In That Was Then, This Is Now) to desperate, almost forlorn acts. In the McMurtry novel, Sonny has already lost Sam the Lion to death, Jacy has left him, and Duane departed left for military service, when a seemingly cruel universe takes Billy from him, too: for the retarded Billy is run over by a truck driver while sweeping the street. His last act is to go back to try to seek amends with the 40-year-old wife of his former football coach whom he (Sonny) had abandoned for Jacy. In the Hinton novel, the tragedy is propelled by the principal characters remaining after Charlie’s death. M&M has run away from home (he is still only thirteen) to join a hippie house and gotten tangled up in drugs. Mark knows the place well, for he sells drugs to some of the hippies there and he has a presumably sexual relationship with at least one of the young women who stays there. Knowing that Cathy and Bryon are upset and trying to find M&M, Mark takes Bryon to the house. Though M&M is out at the time, Bryon realizes Mark’s familiarity with the hippies, which disturbs him, for he is troubled by the illegality of their activities. Crisis comes when Bryon later brings Cathy to the house where they discover M&M (Baby Freak) on a “bad trip” muttering about spiders and talking colors. They rush him to the hospital, but his mind is disturbed and, by the end of the book, his life seems to be shattered. Immediately upon return from the hospital, Bryon discovers a stash of drugs under Mark’s bed, realizes that Mark is a drug pusher, and calls the police to turn him in. This irrevocable act ends everything: Mark, who had loved him like a brother, is thrown into prison and now hates him, and Bryon in turn, who had so loved Cathy, now hates her.

In conclusion, That Was Then, This Is Now and The Last Picture Show are coming of age novels that start the principal male characters off in strong friendships that would seem to last forever but that undergo profound and ultimately disastrous changes. The settings are somewhat different in time and place (Oklahoma in the late 1960s, Texas in the early 1950s), but they tell essentially the same story about the human condition, particularly at the age of reaching adulthood. They are, in this sense, rites of passage. Indeed, they are tales of emotional, psychological, and physical change from a time when these young men felt that everything was sure, easy, and permanent, in many ways a frolic, into a time as adults when it would seem the world is much crueler and they are suddenly and unexpectedly alone, or virtually so. The principal characters all experience great trauma by the end. In both novels, the principal characters experience the death of friends; they come to know love only to lose it; and they lose each other in the process. The survivors are left to try to recreate themselves in the adult world, but they will remember their losses and be left with a profound sadness, as will the reader of both novels. The reader is left to wonder how the haunted adult lives of Bryon in That Was Then, This Is Now and Sonny in The Last Picture Show will turn out, for Hinton and McMurtry inspire us to care about their lives, and ours.

Source: Erik France Critical Essay on That Was Then, This Is Now, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

In That Was Then, This is Now “golden dangerous Mark,” the narrator’s best buddy, also discovers that he is mistaken about his parentage—his real father turns out to be another rodeo cowboy. Bryon tells us about it like this: “Mark had lived at my house ever since I was ten and he was nine and his parents shot each other in a drunken argument.” Later we learn the argument was over Mark’s parentage; the shots were fatal, and the child, hiding under the porch, heard it all. As Mark recalls: “And then they start yelling and I hear this sound like a couple of firecrackers. And I think, well, I can go live with Bryon and his old lady. . . I didn’t like livin’ at home.” The desire to leave home is a sentiment with which most teen-agers can empathize, but few are given so graphic an opportunity to do so. Nor do the majority, I hope, respond to family indifference like Dallas Winston of The Outsiders, who “lied, cheated, stole, rolled drunks, jumped small kids,” even if they occasionally feel the same way about their parents: “What do they matter? Shoot, my old man don’t give a hang whether I’m in jail or dead in a car wreck or drunk in the gutter. That don’t bother me none.”

What is clear from the recurrent themes of Hinton’s novels, like the discovery of mysterious parentage, is that despite their modern, colloquial tone, they are fairy tale adventures (Luke Skywalker’s father is really Darth Vader), and their rumbles as exotic as jousts in Ivanhoe or pirate wars in Treasure Island. What is curious is that grownups insist on the books’ veracity. Hinton announces, “The real boy like Dallas Winston [the role Matt Dillon plays in The Outsiders] was shot and killed by the police for having stolen a car.” Tim Hunter, director of the film Tex, says he was drawn to Hinton’s work because of the way she weaves social problems “into the fabric of a realistic story.”

In fact, the fabric is mythic. There are no verisimilar settings. Presumably the books take place near Tulsa, Oklahoma (the films do), but place names are never mentioned, and were it not for occasional references to rodeos, one would have little notion of the Western ambiance so evident in the movie versions. Characters live in “the neighborhood”; sometimes they go to “the city” or to “the country.” The city is bacchanalian: “There were lots of people and noise and lights and you could feel energy coming off things, even buildings”. (Rumble Fish). The country is pastoral: “The clouds were pink and meadowlarks were singing” (The Outsiders). Temporal location is equally vague, The Outsiders published in 1967, might as easily have been written ten years earlier, in the fifties of its real progenitor, James Dean movies, true, some parenthetical hippies are up to some druggy no-good in That Was Then, This Is Now (1971), but the Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish (1975) might have ridden right off the screen of The Wild One. Far from strikingly realistic in literary form, these novels are romances, mythologizing the tragic beauty of violent youth, as the flashy surrealism of Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, with its film noir symbolism and spooky soundtrack, all too reverently attests.

Moreover, while praised for its “lean Hemingway style” and natural dialogue, Hinton’s prose can be as fervid, mawkish and ornate as any nineteenth- century romance, although this is less true in the later books, especially Tex. The heightened language of her young narrators intensifies the glamour and sentiment of their stories, but it will not strike readers as everyday school-locker lingo. Ponyboy, 14, and Bryon, 16, fling adjectives and archaic phrases (“Hence his name,” “heaven forbid”) around like Barbara Cartland. Bryon notes that his friend Mark’s “strangely sinister innocence was gone.” Ponyboy describes his brother, Sodapop, as having “a finely drawn, sensitive face that somehow manages to be reckless and thoughtful at the same time,” as well as “lively, dancing, recklessly lauging eyes.” Ponyboy is also given to quoting from memory long snatches of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and to using words like “merrily,” “gallant” and “elfish.” Of course, Bryon and Ponyboy point out to us that although they seem to spend all their time hanging out with the gang, they are both honor students: “I make good grades and have a high IQ.” But even Rusty-James of Rumble Fish, stuck in “dumb classes” and, by his own admission, no student (“Math ain’t never been my strong point”), waxes poetical: “I wouldn’t have her to hold anymore, soft but strong in my arms.” Sententious moralizing coats the pages: “That was what he wanted. For somebody to tell him ‘No’. . . If his old man had just belted him—just once, he might still be alive.” “You start wondering why, and you get old.” “We see the same sunset.”

The lyricism, the lack of novelistic detail, the static iconography of Hinton’s books keep the clutter of creation from interfering with the sources of their obviously persistent appeal—their rapid action (mostly violent) unfettered by the demands of a plot, their intense emotions (mostly heavy) and their clear-cut moral maps. Hinton’s fictional universe is as black-and-white as an old cowboy film. The Outsiders is the ur-text. In it there are Socs (Socials) and there are greasers; unlike that of the warring Hatfields and McCoys, Montagues and Capulets, Jets and Sharks, this eternal enmity is neither familial nor racial, but financial. Socs are rich, greasers are poor; Socs are “the in crowd,” greasers are “The Outsiders.” Socs always wear madras and English Leather and drive Mustangs or Corvairs. They always “jump greasers and wreck houses and throw beerblasts for kicks.” That’s pretty much all we get to know about Socs; they’re just the enemy. A Soc girl, Cherry Valance, makes a brief appearance to point out to Ponyboy, “We have troubles you never even heard of,” but those troubles are not explored; instead she schematizes neatly: “You greasers have a different set of values. You’re more emotional. We’re sophisticated—cool to the point of not feeling anything.” Given this fundamental difference (and despite the fact that they see the same sunset), Cherry is obliged to warn Ponyboy: “If I see you in the hall . . . and don’t say hi, well, it’s not personal. . . . We couldn’t let our parents see us with you all.”

Our heroes, greasers, are also initially defined by their appearance and their style of antisocial behavior: “We steal things and drive old souped-up cars and hold up gas stations once in a while . . . just like we leave our shirt-tails out and wear leather jackets.” But popular culture has taught us to interpret this style with sympathy, if not rabid infatuation. The narrators pay continual, indeed obsessive, attention to their own and their friends’ appearance. We hear constantly about “strange golden eyes,” “light-brown, almost-red hair,” faces like “some Greek god come to earth.” They are always asking and reassuring each other about their good looks, particularly the beauty of their hair.

Funky costume and flamboyant hairstyle have long been the outward signs of inward romantic rebellion— from Shelley’s flowing locks and open collars through Ginsberg’s sandals to Elvis’s sideburns— and Ponyboy’s identifying himself through his hair oil (“I am a greaser”) announces his place in a tradition that goes back to Bronte’s crush on Heathcliff, and associates him with such suffering gods as James Dean. It’s significant that many of the young men who played in Coppola’s 1982 film of The Outsiders were to become adolescent idols within the next few years: Dillon, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze. A leather jacket, bloody knuckles and a sensitive soul is an irresistible combination. Pain and sadness help too.

There is no sweeter sorrow than the self-pity of our teens, no pain more rhapsodized than our adolescent anguish; adults simply lose the will to sustain such Sturm und Drang. Like the protagonists of all Bildungsromans, Hinton’s leather-jacketed young Werthers are lyrical on the subject of their psychic aches and pains. Tough as nails on the street, yeah, hey—but alone in the dark, they’re as naked and afraid in a world they never made as any Herman Hesse hero. Confused, lonely, slighted, they share with, they feel for, their readers that most profound pubescent emotion: “I don’t belong.” In the classic apprenticeship novel, the youngster—Tonio Kroger, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel, Eugene Gant—experiences and reflects on this sense of alienation and so grows to understand the particular difference that is his self. When, in The Outsiders, Ponyboy tells us, “I cried passionately, “It ain’t fair that we have all the rough breaks,’” his cri de coeur, like the novel’s title, suggests the tribal rather than personal thrust of Hinton’s use of the theme, as well as its simplistic economic nature. (“You can’t win because they’ve got all the breaks.”) In Hinton’s books, selfhood is subsumed in the tribal gang. “It was great, we were a bunch of people making up one big person” (That Was Then This Is Now) “Why did the Socs hate us so much? We left them alone.” “It wasn’t fair for the Socs to have everything. We were as good as they were” (The Outsiders) So magically does the gang incorporate its members tha in the opening of The Outsiders it miraculously appears out of the night to save Ponyboy from the motiveless malignity of a carful of Socs: “All the noise I had heard was the gang coming to rescue me.” “Somehow the gang sensed what had happened.”

The gang is the family: “We’re almost as close as brothers.” And in contrast to “a snarling, distrustful, bickering pack like the Socs,” greaser gangs are unfailingly loyal and free of rivalry. Maybe they have “too much energy, too much feeling, with no way to blow it off” except through marauding violence, but with one another they are as gentle as maidens on a Victorian valentine, innocently sleeping with their arms around each other, choking with tenderness for one another’s pain. Johnny in The Outsiders is the most vulnerable, most pathetically hurt gang member (the Sal Mineo part in Rebel Without a Cause; for his film of The Outsiders, Coppola even found in Ralph Macchio an actor who looks just like Mineo). Ponyboy’s solicitude for him is shared by even the toughest of the greasers. He is “a little dark puppy that has been kicked too many times and is lost in a crowd of strangers. . . His father was always beating him up, and his mother ignored him. . . If it hadn’t been for the gang, Johnny would never have known what love and affection are.” Like Mineo’s Plato Johnnycake is clearly pegged for tearful sacrifice. And sure enough—having accidentally stabbed a Soc to death and then redeemed himself by saving some children from a burning church— he dies from burns and a broken back after a series of heart-rending hospital-bed scenes. As might be expected in fiction for adolescents, the blood brother bond supersedes all other emotional commitments. That Was Then, This Is Now opens, “Mark and me went down to the bar”; and Bryon’s love for Mark, like the love of Beowulf or Roland for their companions, runs like a lyric refrain through the novel.

These characters do sometimes have girlfriends, but their erotic relationships come nowhere near the power of male camaraderie. Hinton reports she almost didn’t agree to sell Tex to Walt Disney Productions because she “thought they’d really sugar it up, take out all the sex, drugs and violence,” but there is actually far less sex in her books than in the films made from them. Her instinct, conscious or not, that young readers could take endless physical violence and heartbreak but would be embarrassed by physical passion is quite sound. On the page of Rumble Fish, Rusty-James tells us of his visit to Patty, “I just sat there holding her and sometimes kissed the top of her head”; on the screen this becomes a torrid tumble on a couch. Rusty-James’s description, “there were some girls [at the lake] and we built a fire and went swimming,” becomes on screen an orgiastic montage of naked bodies. Similarly, unlike the films, the books are as free of profanity as Heidi. We are told people “talk awful dirty,” but the only curses we hear are almost comically mild: “Glory!” “Shoot!” “Oh blast it!” Indeed, gang members warn the younger ones to avoid “bad habits” like cursing. They may smoke cigarettes, integral to the image, but they don’t much care for booze and are leery of drugs. As well they might be. M&M, That Was Then, This is Now’s counterpart to the doomed Johnnycake, takes LSD, goes psychotic, is hospitalized (the doctor announces solemnly, “He may have lost his mind forever”) and is told that his chromosomes are so messed up that he must forget his dream of a large family.

In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean is trying to cope with a new society, with a new girl, with his parents, with adult authority. He copes in part by means of wry humor, a detachment that is missing in Hinton’s books and in the films made from them. Rather than ask her characters to cope with adults, wryly or otherwise, hinton either removes them or removes their authority. The Oedipal struggle is displaced to older siblings. Ponyboy’s parents are dead; he lives with and is supported by his big brother, Darry, a football star who gave up college to keep the family together. Ponyboy fears and idolizes him. Tex’s mother is dead (after a fight with his father, she walked off in the snow to go dancing, caught pneumonia and quickly succumbed), and his father forgets for months at a time to return home or to send money. Tex lives with and is supported by his older brother, Mace, a basketball star, who he fears and admires. Rusty-James’s mother ran away; his father, once a lawyer, is a hopeless drunk on welfare who wanders in and out of the house mumbling, “What strange lives you two lead,” to Rusty-James and his idolized older brother, the Motorcycle Boy (about whom Hinton seems to feel much as Lady Caroline Lamb felt about Byron: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”). Like Dallas Winston, the Motorcycle Boy is shot to death by the police, leaving the hero to inherit his romantic mantle—even to the extent of going color-blind. Bryon has no father but does have a mother, depicted as a model of saintly virtue. She behaves, however, with a remarkable lack of maternal responsibility or even curiosity. Not only do Bryon and Mark sometimes not “come home for weeks” without being reprimanded but their being beaten black and blue elicits little concern. Mom notices ten stitches in Mark’s head: “How did that happen?” “And Mark answered, ‘Fight,’ and the subject was dropped. That was a good thing about Mom—she’d cry over a dog with a piece of glass in his paw but remained unhysterical when we came home clobbered. . . . Parents never know what all their kids do. . . . It’s a law.” The laws of Hinton’s books are the laws of the cowboy movies, the laws of romance.

Source: Michael Malone, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” in the Nation, Vol. 242, March 8, 1986, pp. 276–79.