Longing looks through young eyes

A little girl, her front tooth coming loose, fidgets in her velvet party dress one particularly hot Thanksgiving in New Orleans. Ella, her parents and her younger brother Benjamin, dressed in his Pilgrim costume, are en route to spend the holiday not, as usual, with relatives, but with strangers: people who eat seaweed and conduct exotic healing rituals. Ella’s mother has been undergoing chemotherapy and has also been pursuing spiritual and holistic approaches to treating her cancer. Thanksgiving with these strangers is simply another oddity for the family to cope with.

“Shoes off now!” a crayoned sign directs them on arrival, and this is only the mildest of several shocks that Ella will experience in the course of the visit. “Pilgrims,” the first of nine short stories in Julie Orringer’s arresting debut collection, “How to Breathe Underwater,” displays this writer’s gift for portraying the world from a child’s (or, in other stories, a teenager’s) perspective. Many writers have a knack for evoking a child’s sensibility. (For aspiring authors, adopting a juvenile viewpoint has practically become a default mode.) But the ability to tell a story -- and keep readers eagerly turning pages -- is less common than might be supposed.

And then there are the small touches that deftly set a mood, limn a character or reveal a relationship:

“Ella looked down at her feet. She was wearing her new patent-leather Mary Janes.

“ ‘Your socks are nice too,’ her father said, and touched her shoulder.

“He stepped out of his own brown loafers and set them on top of the pile. Then he knelt before Ella’s mother and removed her pumps. ‘Shoes off,’ he said to Ella and Ben.

“ ‘Even me?’ Ben said. He looked down at his paper buckles.

“Their father took off Ben’s shoes and removed the paper buckles, tape intact. Then he pressed one buckle onto each of Ben’s socks. ‘There,’ he said.”

Kindness, forbearance and a quiet determination to make the best of things: This is the spirit in which the afternoon begins. But will a positive attitude be enough? While their parents are open-mindedly taking part in mystical rites, Ella and Ben go off to play in the treehouse. What first promises to be nothing worse than an uncomfortable afternoon turns into a genuinely horrifying experience for Ella and Ben, who are thrown into the company of those most dangerous of beasts: other children.

Horror and danger are keynotes in several other stories: a 9-year-old girl witnesses the spite and cruelty of her best friend in “Stations of the Cross,” and a drug-addicted young woman is charged with baby-sitting her 6-year-old niece in “Care.” A mother’s illness casts ineluctable shadows over a sunlit trip to Disney World in “What We Save.” The stories in this collection vividly evoke the intensities of childhood and adolescence, the moments of fear, anxiety, guilt and exhilaration.

“The Isabel Fish” perceptively and movingly portrays a 14-year-old girl coping with the fallout from a genuine tragedy: the accidental death of a friend. The smaller, but still painful, agonies of social ostracism are the subject of “Note to Sixth-Grade Self,” which, for all its virtues, seems rather like a creative writing class assignment. Is this a sixth-grader addressing herself or a grown-up addressing her former sixth-grade self with benefit of hindsight? Either way, the effect is one of cuteness rather than conviction.

Orringer has found fresh ways of approaching the theme of adolescent sexual awakening, whether she is writing about pseudo-sophisticated suburban teenagers or those being raised as Orthodox Jews. In “Stars of Motown Shining Bright,” 15-year-old Lucy, preening over having managed to lose her virginity, wakes up to discover the seamier side of sex -- and friendship. Rebecca of “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones,” seemingly a world apart from Lucy, faces some of the same quandaries. Orringer’s portrait of this particular Orthodox milieu is subtle and multilayered, displaying a keen sense of comedy but also a sensitive understanding of how the heroine’s longing for romance and sensual fulfillment uneasily coexists with her desire for the order, stability and spirituality promised by religion.

One of the most amusing stories in the collection, “When She Is Old and I Am Famous,” is narrated by an older girl, an art student spending time in Italy. Mira (“Have I mentioned yet that I am fat?”) finds it well-nigh intolerable that her sojourn there is being ruined by the presence of her younger cousin, a slender, wraithlike, internationally famous teenage model. Mira even hates the girl’s name: Aida. “Ai-ee-duh: two cries of pain and one of stupidity.” This improbable beauty is the still more improbable daughter of Mira’s Uncle Claude, an aging drag queen. Her mother? No one seems to know. Mira would like to be able to drown her envy in the knowledge that, one day, glamorous Aida will lose her looks, while Mira will become a famous artist. But she’s not sure she’s talented enough to make the grade.

Here, as throughout the collection, Orringer’s engaging wit, her eye for social detail, her ear for patterns of speech and thought, and her insights into human nature proclaim her a writer to be reckoned with.