"Young Adam" by Alexander Trocchi

Young Adam is about a rootless man working on canal barges in Scotland. This hyper-realistic story describes a few months in his life, from the discovery of a woman's drowned body in the canal, through his various sexual escapades.

It is told in very spare prose, which reminded me of The Outsider by Camus. It conjured up images of the 'kitchen sink' films and dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The deadpan narrative related what had happened with very little comment; at the same time there were nuggets of philosophy, such as "It is the word 'I' which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction." (1.1)

I think I most enjoyed the first part of the book, which sets the scene, and seems to be a narrative going nowhere about an amoral young man going nowhere; again reminiscent of the existential novels of Camus (and Sartre). In the second part there is more narrative and at the same time more introspection. It is more conventional and less alienated, yet somehow less amoral (because the narrator seems to recognise his ethical dilemma, so there is more understanding of right and wrong). 

Trocchi also wrote Cain's Book, a more experimental, much less structured and beatnik-influenced book about a junkie living on a barge in America.

Selected Quotes:

• "From the moment I had wakened that morning things had begun to happen, nothing spectacular - I'm not talking about the corpse - but a kind of excitement at the edges of me." (1.2)
• "The brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke." (1.3)
• "There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals ... each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation." (1.3)
• "I had experienced before this conjunction, I mean the cold air containing the warm smell of a woman." (1.4)
• "What we said was trivial but our way of saying it was not." (1.5)
• "What remained implied what was missing." (1.5)
• "Above, a ribbon of white sky, just beginning to be overclouded, from which rain fell in slender, broken javelins." (2.2)
• "I am a rootless kind of man." (2.3)
• "All judges, it occurred to me, all lawyers and lawyers' clerks ought to be forced to try their case in the nude." (3.1)
• "Whether or not they are conscious of it, all judges must look upon themselves as God. To judge is to presume one is God." (3.2)

December 2022; 153 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God