Short takes

May 01, 2011|By Kate Tuttle, Globe Correspondent

THE ANTI-ROMANTIC CHILD:
A Story of Unexpected Joy
By Priscilla Gilman
Harper, 291 pp., $24.99

When Priscilla Gilman’s son Benj started reading by age 2 and soon afterward began quoting great rafts of Romantic poetry, it’s easy to see why she’d be bewitched and proud, rather than concerned; both Gilman and her husband taught literature, loved books, and had read early themselves. Other quirks soon appeared: Benj was slow to sit and stand, and when he began walking it was on his toes. He didn’t play with toys, couldn’t eat anything but baby food. His verbal ability, so extraordinarily advanced when focusing on texts, was not quite normal when it came to conversation. Slowly, Gilman realized that the things she had “considered unique and special’’ about her son “were instead uncontrollable manifestations of a disorder.’’ After developmental specialists confirm Benj’s problems, Gilman faces a grim reassessment. “He didn’t have an interesting unusual mind; he had faulty wiring. He doesn’t have a distinctive personality; he had a syndrome.’’ By the book’s end, of course, readers will realize that he has both.

In this lovely, thoughtful memoir, Gilman probes the relationship between “literature and life,’’ between the Romantic poet Wordsworth (the focus of her academic study) and her adored son. Beginning with her own childhood, which was privileged, creative, even magical, she describes the difficulty of connecting with a hyperliteral, rigidly concrete child — an anti-romantic child, immune to metaphor. Yet she does connect with him, and in doing so finds the romantic in even Benj’s mind. She also begins to see him in her beloved Wordsworth, whose work, she writes, “argues passionately for the worth and value of society’s forgotten, excluded, or less powerful ones, eccentrics and outcasts, beggars, radicals, old people, butterflies, and children.’’

BRIGHT BEFORE US
By Katie Arnold-Ratliff
Tin House, 288 pp., paperback, $14

Francis Mason is a second-grade teacher who describes his relationship to his students as “helping them learn how to be people.’’ Yet from the opening scene of this haunting debut novel, he isn’t much help to anyone, least of all himself. On a field trip to a San Francisco beach, the children come upon a body, and the horror pushes Francis, a damaged and damaging young man, into a spiraling crisis — whether he emerges from it having learned how to be a person himself is the book’s central, not quite answered, question.

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