Inside the Outside

I'm having a hard time sorting how I feel about Inside the Outside. I'm the type of reader that is generally comfortable with putting a book aside for a while (which is why I'm so slow to finish anything), but this one kept me coming back. The writing has great flow to it, and the story and characters pull you in.

However, the prose also keeps you at arms length. The style is simple, clinical even childish, which makes sense when you find out who the narrator is. It works for the first half of the book, when we are entrenched in the Divinity of Feminine Reproach, and we are seeing things almost exclusively through Timber Marlowe's naive and isolated perspective. The cold wording gives an escape route for some of the horrible things Timber goes through, while still conveying the seed of evil that begins to grow inside her.

Once Timber is on the Outside though, and the perspective expands, I felt a little gypped. Timber was going through some serious life changes - having a child, falling in love, making a real life for herself - and its conveyed with not much more intensity than a grocery list. I didn't want to take Timber's feelings for granted, she's a complex and intriguing character, and not every person feels the same way about becoming a mother, especially one to a product of rape. We just have to take the narrator's word for it that most important thing to Timber is the family that came together around her.

We're also asked to sympathize with a lot of morally questionable characters. Billy D Luscious, for example, while a sweet man who genuinely cares for Timber, also facilitated murder and sex slavery (not to mention, Timber's own rape). Early on in the book, we're supposed to feel for a young man who is executed, an event Timber unintentionally caused, as well as his young lover who later commits suicide. But I kept thinking “Isn't this the guy who had sex with a twelve-year-old? Not caring so much.” I like reading about morally questionable characters, and I rather like how this book turns stereotypes on their heads (the whole setting rests in unwholesome worlds, from a cannibalistic cult to the porn industry to organized crime, and yet that's the world where Timber raises a daughter who goes to Disneyland every birthday and loves Cosmic Bowling), but because of the detached prose style it doesn't feel like the story digs deep enough.

Despite all this, I did genuinely enjoy this book, which is partially why its left me so confused. I liked its brutality and straightforward nature, I just wish it took a few moments here and there to show something rather just tell it.