November 7, 1999
Growing Pains
In a debut novel, an 8-year-old child recalls the day her mother died.

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  • First Chapter: 'The Tiny One'
  • Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Reviews 'The Tiny One' (Nov. 4, 1999)

    By Eliza Minot.
    253 pp. New York:
    Alfred A. Knopf. $22.

    Let's begin with the predicament. If you're a novelist and you decide to write from a child's point of view, you have, historically, two ways to go about it. The first is the Jamesian method of ''What Maisie Knew.'' In that scrupulous book, pint-size only in its protagonist, James renders Maisie's experience in a third-person voice far too sophisticated to come out of her own mouth. The sensations are Maisie's; their articulation isn't. The other option is the Salinger method of ''The Catcher in the Rye'': direct, pitch-perfect ventriloquism -- the veritable voice of youth telling its own story.

    Or is there a third way? Eliza Minot, in her plucky, winning, occasionally troubling first novel, ''The Tiny One,'' has endeavored to chart a middle course between these two extremes, telling the story of her heroine, Via Revere, age 8, from a shifting perspective.

    Via is the youngest member of a large, affluent, Roman Catholic family, and Minot organizes her story with all the rigor of a catechism. The book is divided into four parts. In the first and last, chapters alternate between first- and third-person narration. Parts II and III are a first-person account of the day Via's mother died.

    ''I love my mum so much I want to pop open my chest like a flower.'' So Via declares near the opening of the novel. The sentence displays the book's main qualities and much of its charm: the fervid Mutterliebe, the childlike leap of imagination, the accidental poetry. I for one have never heard an 8-year-old speak in exactly this way but I'm willing to believe that this one does. I'm not, however, willing to believe that an 8-year-old would say the following, as Via does later in the book: ''The players run flashing in and out of the dark shadows into the syrupy long light.'' Or even: ''He's wearing a sweater that has oblong wooden buttons at the neck.''

    Jerry Bauer/ Alfred A. Knopf
    Eliza Minot
    One could argue that Via is precocious. (We are told that she has skipped a grade in reading.) Of course, the oldest dodge when writing from a kid's point of view is to make the kid a genius (again see Salinger). This allows the author to sneak in perceptions that should be above his little hero's head. However smart, though, Via Revere isn't likely to appear anytime soon on ''It's a Wise Child.'' After lunch at the Magic Pan, she says: ''They make really thin pancakes and then put regular food on top, then fold it. Our waitress calls them 'craps.' ''Is this the same narrator who speaks of ''syrupy long light''? Of ''oblong buttons''? What's going on here?

    The following, I think: Minot is willfully, or very creatively, fusing the Jamesian method with the Salingeresque. At times, she allows Via to speak in an almost grown-up, or at least teenage, voice. At others, she wants to indicate to the reader the limits of Via's experience. It doesn't appear that Minot wants to perform a ventriloquist act; Via's voice grows more or less sophisticated as narrative events require.

    If pressed, I would have to count this indeterminacy of voice a flaw. The reader spends too much time puzzling over whether Via's voice is appropriate. Why not make Via 15 and have her recall the sad day when she was 8 and her mother disappeared from the world? As flaws go, however, it's far from devastating. One of the pleasures of encountering a new talent is the chance of seeing technical imperfections redeemed by the force of pure energy. Which is to say that, after a while, the reader stops quibbling, surrenders to Via's story, and enjoys it.

    Ostensibly, ''The Tiny One'' is an elegy for Via's mother, who is killed in a car accident. We follow Via one Valentine's Day, from the moment she wakes up until the terrible news arrives. Chapters are titled ''The Breakfast,'' ''The Bath,'' ''The Bus Stop.'' (Instead of a catechism, ''The Tiny One'' might be aptly compared to a Book of Hours.) Each chapter records a separate activity, and each activity inspires a memory, which in turn inspires another memory, so that the chapters unfurl into a daisy chain of recollections from Via's life. A card-carrying modernist would have run all these various times together in the fashion of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Minot, born into a time less patient with experimentation, helpfully separates the time shifts with blank space. By using this associative approach, she dramatically shows the questing, swerving quality of a child's mind.

    Occasionally, the bridges between sections are forced, but the sections themselves are always rich with detail and fresh insight. On pinkeye: ''It feels like the tight stitching of a football is holding my eyelids sewn together. The crust feels huge. It's like a thick stripe of stale pizza crust.'' Of a housefly: ''It sharpens its front legs like a little bad guy dreaming up an evil plan.'' And most breathtakingly:

    ''The dryer sounds like the feel of something I think of a lot. I don't know why I think of it, but my head drifts there like before I fall asleep or when I'm riding my bike home from school. . . . It's just an area of dark blue Atlantic water. . . . It's like I'm a little above the water looking over and down at it. The waves spoon up and down, glinting tipped flecks of sunlight like everywhere else. I'm suspended up. I keep thinking of it. It's a closed-in space of pretty water and I feel like I'm hovering beside it, trying to see. It's like that's where rain is born. It's like that's where I could be, or like that's where I've been.''

    "She's just a kid and it's morning but nothing's the same. Everything's different now. She's at the beginning of a new chapter. She's perched at the edge of a new era. Grief has been born boring into her soft ripe life full of cartwheels and digging with sticks, leaves and laughter, sky and light, her mother's face and jumps in the air. Grief's been injected like a strange sedative that has the opposite effect -- it wakes you up. It's jarred her like shaking her shoulders. It has her. The grizzle of life has rattled her numb. It's like she's been whacked in the head out of laughter and now she sits alone on her bed, looking out, in awe at anything, in awe at everything, stunned."

    -- an excerpt from 'The Tiny One'

    Oddly, though, when tragedy finally arrives, it's less affecting than we might expect. We don't get much insight into Mum. She's loving, she dotes on Via, she's just about as perfect as a mother can be. But it's the rest of Via's story that is original, idiosyncratic and, therefore, compelling. Officially about a mother's death, ''The Tiny One'' ends up being about a child's life. On a long car trip, Via's brother gets her to eat a piece of skin from his foot by saying it's a fruit roll. Via watches as an older girl, unable to bear the fragility of the baby chick in her hand, squeezes it to death. These are beautiful moments, utterly strange and convincing, and they mark the level of Minot's achievement.

    I was hoping to avoid dredging up sibling rivalry in this review, but the many correspondences between ''The Tiny One'' and ''Monkeys,'' by the author's older sister, the novelist Susan Minot, make some comparison necessary. As a girl may sometimes borrow her sister's clothes, Eliza Minot appears here for her debut in a few items previously worn by her sibling. Both ''The Tiny One'' and Susan Minot's ''Monkeys'' deal with a large, well-to-do family that lives in Massachusetts, summers in Maine, skis in Vermont or New Hampshire and travels to Bermuda. In ''Monkeys'' the family has seven children; in ''The Tiny One,'' four. Both novels concern the death in a car accident of a mother, who in both books shares many of the same attributes. Both books have scenes where someone nearly chokes at the dinner table.

    All this is forgivable and even, perhaps, to be expected. Eliza Minot can't be held accountable for coming from a family already so well documented by a talented older member. But in a few instances the similarities go farther than that. For example, in ''Monkeys,'' Susan Minot writes of family trips in the car: ''When we bounce, Mum says, 'Thank-you-ma'am.' ''In ''The Tiny One,'' Via tells us: ''When we go over a bump in the car Mum says, 'Thank you, ma'am.' ''Again, from ''Monkeys'': ''We clap our mittens. . . . Sherman has been chewing on his thumb and it's a pointed black witch's hat.'' And from ''The Tiny One,'' where the narrator says of her own mitten, ''Whenever I put it on first thing in the morning the thumb's so hard and pricky that its tip is all pointy but jagged like a tiny witch's hat.'' Eliza Minot might be unaware to what extent she is echoing some of her sister's work. Nevertheless, these jarring near quotations -- just two of them, by my reading -- mar what is otherwise a glittering first book.

    But let's end with the successes. Via's voice, however old or young, is infectious. Eliza Minot has a sharp eye, a great ear and a terrific memory. She has a sorceress's ability to perceive the emotional spirits trapped in nature. She has a wild, unstrung, lyrical gift. Reading ''The Tiny One'' is like going under hypnosis to retrieve repressed memories -- not of abuse, but of everything we'd like to remember and can't.

    Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of ''The Virgin Suicides.''

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