Rumble Fish belongs, essentially, to one of the established forms of children's books, the animal story, in which the child is given the opportunity of living in the skin of the grizzly bear or the wild horse. The experiences of the animal are felt by the child, though in a different way from that in which the animal feels them. So in Rumble Fish the boy's emulation of his older brother, his alienation from his father, his rejection of school and authority—the things many children feel—are projected onto the terrible dangerous animals who live in the concrete jungle. They are sufficiently distanced for the child to identify with them without being overwhelmed. This is a story about an alien way of life, just as the animal stories are, and like most of them it falls into the trap of sentimentalising its subject. But it is an...