Just the right mix of pain and humor

Imagine one of Carson McCullers’ feisty young heroines transported to Washington, D.C., living with two oddball uncles (one of them a cross-dresser), and you’ll have a sense of Elray Mayhew, the delightfully precocious protagonist of Leslie Marshall’s debut novel.

“A Girl Could Stand Up” is much funnier than anything McCullers ever wrote. Yet the ache of aloneness and the painful pull of memory -- so pervasive in McCullers’ work -- are also present in this novel. Few authors are adept at portraying, without sentimentality, the profound loneliness Toni Morrison once described as the kind that “roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

Such is the deep loneliness experienced by Elray, a weird and hugely imaginative kid. She is acutely aware that spending so much time in her own mind, as opposed to reality, is somewhat problematic, yet it’s an impulse she refuses to relinquish. There’s a reason for Elray’s fierce retreat into invisibility: She becomes an orphan on her sixth birthday, when her parents are electrocuted on an amusement park ride.

Although Marshall stuffs her novel with quirky characters and bizarre, sometimes unlikely, events, she invests her story with authenticity where it counts, as in depicting how losing a parent (or in this case, both) affects a child. The immediate effect of loss upon Elray is not an outburst of tears and fury. In fact, even though Elray was with her parents when they died, she can hardly recall exactly what happened; her memory places a gauzy, self-protective covering over the traumatic event.

Not knowing how to grieve after the accident and unable to speak for three days, Elray finds solace in hiding in the musty crawlspace beneath her house. When her voice returns to her, it comes as a sudden, unexpected scream, but still she cannot access her trauma in a direct way. “In theory I had witnessed my parents’ death,” she says. “Yet when I tried to summon a memory of the event, all I could find was the formally scripted, third-person mind movie that had played for me in the crawlspace on my big scream afternoon. I could not connect to it emotionally.”

Elray subsists on what she calls her “mind movies,” flashes of scenes and images from the past, which she plays like videos from a library, over and over again. The passages describing this child’s rich private life, kept safely hidden from the absurd world of adults, seem utterly real, without being self-consciously quirky or overly cute.

All of the characters in “A Girl Could Stand Up” are eccentric, but endearingly so. Along with Rena, the theatrical lawyer hired to sue the amusement park, there are Elray’s new custodians: Uncle Harwood, a macho, itinerant magazine photographer; and the melodramatic cross-dressing Uncle Ajax (whose strange name is a truncation of Andrew Jackson, his first and middle name).

These men are thrown together to raise Elray after her parents die. Their arguments about how to raise her, and even what to feed her, are both hilarious and poignant; they have no clue how to raise a young girl, but they try hard.

Aunt Ajax, as she prefers to be called, even goes into Method Parenting mode: Elray describes coming home from school one day to find Aunt Ajax lying on the sofa, panting heavily, determined to master the Lamaze childbirth technique.

One of the most striking ways Elray copes with her newly topsy-turvy life is through her obsession with invisibility: the boundaries between the living and the dead, darkness and light, and her own mysterious isolated place in the world. It isn’t until she meets a boy named Raoul that she finds a soul mate in that regard: He truly understands and even shares her fascination. And he enjoys lying in dark crawlspaces, with its illicit thrill, as much as she does.

Together these misfits explore the boundaries of invisibility, as well as invincibility, and at times the adventures turn dangerous. Their friendship (and ultimate romance) is rendered with the same truthfulness and charm that imbues the rest of the novel.

If “A Girl Could Stand Up” suffers from anything, it’s frenetic ambition and a surfeit of information. The plot line gets busier as the story goes along, yet in the end Marshall does successfully tie the various strands together. She shows an indefatigable attention to detail, and if the effect is somewhat dizzying for the reader, it’s also rather impressive.

Moreover, Marshall never loses sight of the core of her story, which depicts the triumph of the spirit. Of course that’s a familiar theme, but nothing about this novel seems stale, thanks to the author’s wild inventiveness and humor and the empathy and generosity she gives her characters.