Reviews are out for Chris Adrian's first short story collection, "A Better Angel." The Seattle Times, a two-paragraph blurb at Esquire, a thorough review at the San Francisco Chronicle, and lastly at the LA Times. It's this last review, by Lizzie Skurnick, which troubles me.
Skurnick's main complaint is that the children in "A Better Angel" seem to be acting older than their age. 8-year-olds don't read Thomas Merton or kill horses or recite Emily Dickinson.
She seems to have missed much of the collection. Some of the protagonists are teens. As far as the children, the point in many of these stories is that these children are possessed, either literally or metaphorically. And I do think there is a literary tradition of writing about precocious, odd children, children that aren't like other children, and aren't using "Cray-Pas" and blowing bubbles in their milk.
I knew one kid, son of a theologian, who knew Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew by the time he was seven and could argue esoteric points of doctrine with seminarians. I believe that it would be possible to represent him in fiction and make it believable. Precocious children should not be off limits in fiction.
Here's an excerpt from the review, where she's critiquing the short story "Stab":
Eventually, Calvin and Molly turn their sights on the sheriff. There is a grim physical humor in the thought of two 8-year-olds trip-tripping over the ice to lay murderous hands on the "false Santa" himself, but it's quite difficult to kill a grown person — as Adrian, a pediatrician, should know.
Skurnick seems to be implying here that the two 8-year-olds did kill the "false Santa" while in fact, they tried very hard to kill him but failed. So the tut-tut finger-wagging ("shouldn't a pediatrician know that?") comes off as a bit uninformed. Did Skurnick read to the end of the story?
All in all, Skurnick's tone is too dismissive and snide, and "A Better Angel" deserves better attention, including your own.
2 comments
I can vouch for your observations with regard to precocious children! But I haven’t read Adrian’s full review (yet)…
For what it’s worth, I’ve accepted the children characters of Chris Adrian — they’ve worked for me — but as characters, exaggerated figures w/in an environment that’s fictional to begin with. He works, in the stories I’ve seen, w/in a heightened reality. One mustn’t come to him expecting, for instance, the tamped-down ambience of Raymond Carver.