BOOK REVIEW : The Psychological Link in Children’s Stories : AUDACIOUS KIDS Coming of Age in America’s Classic Children’s Books by Jerry Griswold Oxford University Press;$25; 285 pages

Jerry Griswold is pleased about our society’s renewed enthusiasm for children’s books. He is a professor of English at San Diego State University where he teaches a course in the golden age of American juvenile literature (1864-1914) and has found enrollments are going up. “My students,” he writes, “tell me that they take the course in order to read the books they weren’t given the chance to encounter in childhood.”

Griswold offers them a reading list derived from “some of the most popular literary works of the period.” His reading and rereading of “The Wizard of Oz,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm,” “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” “Tarzan of the Apes,” “The Prince and the Pauper,” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Little Women,” “Toby Tyler,” “Hans Brinker,” “The Secret Garden” and “Pollyanna” have given rise to a book about the 12 novels.

One day in class a student asked Griswold, “Why are the children in so many American childhood classics orphans?” The insight in that question suggested to the professor that he could analyze these stories for their psychological similarities as well as the “resemblances” that result from authors influencing one another and the books’ appeal to the general public then as now. The plot summary he could then see in all of these books he calls “The Three Lives of the Child Hero.”

The linking plot features are these: “A child is born to parents who married despite the objections of others. For a time the family is well-to-do, members of the nobility or otherwise happy and prosperous. The child’s parents die, or the child is separated from his or her parents and effectively orphaned. Without their protection, the child suffers from poverty and neglect and (if nobly born) is dispossessed.

“The hero or heroine then makes a journey to another place and is adopted into a second family. In these new circumstances the child is treated harshly by an adult guardian of the same sex but sometimes has help from an adult of the opposite sex. Eventually, however, the child triumphs over his or her antagonist and is acknowledged. Finally some accommodation is reached between the two discordant phases of the child’s past: life in the original or biological family and life in the second or adoptive family.”

This basic formula serves the author well, as far as it goes; it does demonstrate the similarity between the books. And we are meant to use Griswold’s analysis to help us appreciate that “this country’s children’s literature is not marginal, but (belongs) squarely within our central literary tradition.”

But if we find it obvious that these books deserve respect, then we may begin to worry about the author’s stress on their cultural influence. For he does want us to appreciate that, too: “As this study has suggested, the recurring story of maturation in American children’s books embodies and speaks directly to our own particular cultural experience and to America’s vision of itself; as a young country always making itself anew, rebelling against authority, coming into its own, and establishing its own identity.” Griswold is so moved by the notion that we are “positive thinkers” that he doesn’t pause to consider the darker ramifications of a heritage of perpetual “rebellion.”

Griswold is gratified that so many adults today are finding renewed interest in these books. This is understandable because he teaches children’s literature at colleges. But he doesn’t ask why grown-ups missed these classics in their teen-age years. He does not wonder at the appeal of adolescent scenarios to adults.

I read the title “Audacious Kids” over the telephone to my English stepson, who teaches history at Oxford, and he laughed at the way we Americans naively boast about our heroes and ourselves in their reflection.

I was embarrassed, not by “Huckleberry Finn” or “Pollyanna,” but by one more of our professors celebrating who we are instead of helping us to understand.