Books: The Age of Innocence

Childhood innocence doesn't crop up much these days in serious fiction. Perhaps Freud is to blame, or maybe William Golding, whose Lord of the Flies dramatized the pre-Romantic notion that young folks deprived of civilization will naturally turn into savages. Even children's books now tend to shun wide-eyed wonder and to feature instead little sophisticates dealing knowingly with various forms of family dysfunction.

Tony Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy (Little, Brown; 227 pages; $23.95), blithely and successfully counters this trend. It covers a year in the life of Jim Glass Jr., from his 10th to 11th birthdays, in the tiny hamlet of Aliceville, N.C., during the mid-1930s. His father died of a heart attack a week before Jim was born, and he has been raised by his mother and her three bachelor brothers, Zeno and the twins Coran and Al. When the book opens, Jim has never traveled more than 30 miles from Aliceville. What he doesn't know about the world would fill many, many books; what he learns during a year deftly fills this one.

Earley, whose 1997 collection of stories Here We Are in Paradise earned considerable praise and attention, presents Jim's story as a series of quietly, precisely rendered vignettes. In the first one, the birthday boy is allowed to help the grownups hoe the cornfield in preparation for spring planting. Thrilled at this recognition of his new maturity, Jim listens to Uncle Zeno explain how to use the hoe and then sets to work. After a while, though, the task becomes less thrilling. He puts down his hoe and starts throwing rocks: "When Jim picked up his hoe, he noticed that it was about the length of a baseball bat. He grasped the handle right above the blade and took a couple of practice swings. He found a suitable hitting rock and tossed it up in the air and swung at it with the handle. Strike one." The topic covered here is not goofing off but rather how a young boy feels while doing so.

Seen through Jim's eyes, everything that happens to him seems strange and somehow magical. On his first major journey, a trip in a truck with Uncle Al to South Carolina to see about buying some horses, Jim looks out at unfamiliar farmhouses and thinks, "People live here. They don't know who I am." Uncle Al makes a side trip to Myrtle Beach so that Jim can get his first look at the Atlantic: "He wished that just for a moment, until he grew used to the sight, the ocean would simply hold still. But the waves lined up and bore down on the wide, white beach like a gang of boys intent on jumping a gully."

Unstated but implicit throughout the novel is the sense that life is teaching Jim that he will someday have to leave Aliceville, his mother, the uncles who tried to fill the place left by his dead father. Preserving the present moment is as impossible as making the ocean hold still. Grownups who dwell overlong on such a thought may be accused, with some justice, of rank sentimentality. But such folks can watch this knowledge, in Jim the Boy, dawn on a child and remember or imagine their own ages of innocence.

--By Paul Gray