Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story

In this erudite study of eight child characters from literature, critic Gross (Puppet) examines how “their way with stories is often at odds with that of the adults around them.” The characters “ask us to think differently about innocence, how innocence gets lost or stays in place, how it takes up changed forms,” Gross writes. He argues that Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland explores “the uncertain threshold between the adult and the child, in Alice herself and among the creatures she meets,” while in Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the character’s “uncanny” status as a wooden puppet means he “remains bound to death.” Odradek, in Franz Kafka’s short story “The Cares of a Family Man,” meanwhile, is an “old spirit,” and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica parses the ways adults try to “find out the truth of what the children have gone through.” Gross notes that “my choice of subjects is in the end a personal one,” and indeed his close readings are shot through with pensive personal reflections: “I keep going back over the book in my mind, trying to give shape to that sadness, to say where it lives,” he writes of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart. The result is an original spin on literary criticism. (Oct.)