Book Review – Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi

The Story of a Guilt-riddled Drifter by a Scottish Beat Writer

Aug 19, 2009

With intricate, experimental prose, Trocchi takes the reader on a psychological journey through one man's reaction to his responsibility in the death of his former lover.

Not quite a mystery, but enhanced with the attributes of a fine literary crime novel, Young Adam opens with a death. In the early morning dawn, narrator Joe and his boss Leslie discover the body of a beautiful young woman floating alongside their barge. What follows is a complex, three-part narrative detailing Joe and his relationship with Leslie, Leslie’s wife, several other women and the anonymous dead woman.

After this initial event, Part One of Young Adam continues along with very little further mention of the death of the woman. Instead, Trocchi has Joe embark on a relentless campaign to seduce Leslie’s wife Ella. Joe’s focus on this task verges on obsessional and alerts the reader to Joe’s changeable nature. After this first warning, several other hints begin to infiltrate the story and by the time Part Two opens, the reader has become quite wary of Joe’s revelations and memories.

Part Two sees Joe changing directions completely. He admits the woman they found dead in the river that morning was his former girlfriend Cathie. And slowly, very slowly, he begins to relate the details of their relationship and the circumstances of her death. Trocchi’s clever use of both the novel’s structure and Joe’s narrative voice reveals how Joe purposefully deceives himself and the reader about his true nature.

Gradually, Cathie’s death takes over as Joe’s primary focus. He begins to collect newspaper clippings about the event and soon learns that a plumber has been accused of her murder. Joe separates himself from Ella, returning to the old neighborhood where he lived with Cathie and revisits many of his memories of their life together.

This section of the novel provides a detailed examination of Joe’s feelings of culpability and remorse. And it also raises several important questions about Joe and his role in Cathie’s death. But Trocchi goes further than this by showing the reader how Joe interacts with several other women, revealing certain troubling misogynistic tendencies. At this point the novel becomes less about a single woman’s death and more about a pattern of behavior in a rootless young man.

Trocchi’s Exploration of Beat Values More Cynical Than His American Counterparts

Alexander Trocchi is considered a member of the Beat Generation and Young Adam explores many of the themes the Beats held in esteem. Namely, flaunting conventional social boundaries. Joe embodies the very itinerant, hedonistic character-type the Beats often relied on, but the aesthetic of that experience in Trocchi’s novel is markedly more cynical and pessimistic with respect to the more mainstream Beats.

Despite the vivid imagery and lyrical style of Trocchi’s writing, the overall mood of the novel is melancholy. Joe may be living as he chooses and along his own rules, but the result of this freedom is an almost complete separation from other human beings, an overwhelming emptiness.

Young Adam, Oneworld Classics, 2008 (originally published in 1954 by Olympia Press), 153 p.

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