Joy and sorrow claim equal time in tales of childhood

Short People

Stories

Joshua Furst

Alfred A. Knopf: 212 pp., $23

*

Childhood is a time of imaginative play, when make-believe creatures are real, morphing from dragons into bunnies at our command, and the world is a miraculous setting for our fantasies and nightmares, waiting for us to figure out how it all works. In adolescence, as we begin to comprehend the world and its codes, the rules vacillate. What was cool last week is geeky now. What was OK, even admirable, for someone else to do becomes problematic when we try it. As grown-ups, we finally think we’ve gotten a handle on the ever-changing constraints of life until the challenge of raising children.

Joshua Furst’s “Short People” is a startling first collection of short fiction focusing, in one manner or another, on childhood’s delightful and bewildering stages. He captures the utter joy and wonder of the formative years, making real the awe we long ago forgot, along with the time’s bleak and nefarious sides -- those aspects of growing up we’d perhaps rather not remember.

“The Age of Exploration” features two 6-year-old boys learning about the world together. “Billy and Jason -- grass-stained, kool-aid-tongued starbursting in a limitless world -- smear dandelions across their cheeks and foreheads, their forearms,” Furst writes. “They climb trees and pick crab apples, which they then whip at each other like darts.... Or they hang from the monkey bars and turn the world upside down.... They sit and they spin and they spin, and they don’t ever come when they’re called. They don’t even hear adult voices, not now. It’s summer. Grown-ups don’t exist in summer, not really.” The story follows the boys’ adventures as they map out their neighborhood, and readers are swept into their reverie, probing with the boys the newness of everything they see. But young life, Furst reminds us, isn’t all dandelion-picking. Just as the boys begin to make the neighborhood realm their own, Jason’s family moves away, forever altering both boys’ maps of life.

Shawn, the school-age child in “This Little Light,” is newly baptized and takes to heart the religious training he’s been given with such fervency that he “patrols his life and the lives of everyone else he knows, prodding the Evil out of the Kingdom of Good,” thereby making life a torment for his parents. By taking literally everything he’s been told -- children are nothing if not literalists -- he hopes to make himself and his family acceptable to God, damn the cost.

A harrowing tale, “Red Lobster,” illustrates a restaurant reunion between children and their absentee father. The kids can order anything on the menu, the father graciously tells them, as long as they clean their plates. Like many stories in this collection, “Lobster” starts out light, maintaining an aura of ease, until darkness overshadows the scene as the children go to distressing lengths to get their father’s attention.

The intricacies of budding sensuality are explored in two stories with teen girls trying to harness their sexual power and failing to do so. And in “The Good Parents,” the father exemplifies the befuddlement of parenthood. He had decided long ago that “he’d raise his kids to emulate the best in human nature, teach them to distinguish between the base and the lofty.” He keeps the house television-free, bans popular music, disallows toys that glorify violence or reinforce gender stereotypes. He’d do it all right. The story picks up several years later when his children have grown feral and the father is calling Social Services on himself.

Interspersed among the tales are short notes jotted down by a maternity nurse who witnesses countless children’s births and records what she foresees as the difficulties and pain that lie ahead for each of the newborns. These notations come to a head in “Failure to Thrive” in which the nurse weaves together her predictions with her own story.

In Furst’s world, childhood is much more complex than we typically see in short fiction. His tales do not simply depict the Hallmark-card nirvana of cradled young lives and wide-eyed amazement, though those features are present; nor do they focus solely on the cruel and fearful domain of boogeymen, betrayal and mistreatment. He manages a knife’s-edge balance between both, reminding us of the simultaneous happiness and horror of being young.

One 16-year-old character, who has been all but disowned by her movie-star mother because having a daughter her age would make the starlet appear older than she’d like, plays with razor blades.

“I was young and livid and I wanted everything to be stark and clear,” the girl tells us. “If the truth was as cruel as I believed it was, I wanted the cruelty to be explicit, so we could all see what we’d stepped in.” Furst makes it all explicit -- the cruelty, the astonishment, the treachery, the rapture -- and in doing so creates a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of what it means to be a child. Or, more to the point, what it means to be human.