Picking up the pieces

Up High in the Trees

A Novel

Kiara Brinkman

Grove: 328 pp., $23

WRITING in a child’s voice is one of the hardest and most interesting things a writer can do. The first challenge is making it believable; the second, sustaining the voice and allowing it to grow and change. A child’s voice leaves absolutely no margin for error -- one false note and you can lose your readers. It’s resonant work too. After all, the young voice that still lives in all of us drags up fears and distortions when forced to the surface. The author has some obligation to sculpt away his or her own crusty stuff from the character and fashion someone all readers can relate to.

Kiara Brinkman’s first novel, “Up High in the Trees,” is narrated by Sebby (Sebastian), a 9-year-old boy whose mother, pregnant with a daughter, has just been hit by a car and killed. Sebby’s older brother and sister are able to move on with their lives, but Sebby and his father become disoriented, unglued. Both take to hiding under beds and in closets for long stretches; the boy jumps off a pier into freezing water in what looks like a suicide attempt. Finally, the father takes Sebby out of school and moves into the isolated country house by the sea that he once shared with his wife.

It is fascinating to watch Sebby will himself in utero. Like a nervous squirrel, he collects bits of memories and photographs and conversations and family lore, looking for a trail that will lead him back to a time and place before he was born, before his mother died; a place where he and his mother and unborn sister can look down on the confusing world of life and death. “I wanted to be back in the trees where I was before I was me,” Sebby reflects. “I wanted to be up high again and then Mother would be right there below me. I wanted to watch her and keep watching her always.”

Every narrative is a life raft when the boat goes down. If you can explain things, you can build on them; it is only then that you can start to move on. In order to be born again into this new, motherless world, Sebby struggles to reconstruct the story of his mother’s death. He finds that he knows what happened to her, that he is connected to her, in ways that only a mother and child can be.

“I don’t want to tell anyone, but it’s here inside of me,” he thinks. “I know things that happened to Mother and what she saw.

“I was sleeping, but I could see Mother running in the dark.

“The car came around the corner with its lights shining. Mother closed her eyes and ran into the lights.” Brinkman sustains the child’s voice throughout the novel, at times even testing a reader’s patience with Sebby’s obsessive thoroughness. The only false note is struck in a series of letters the boy writes to his teacher, Ms. Lambert. These contain hints of adult wisdom -- of processed and digested material -- that are slightly out of character, though it is of course possible that Sebby simply expresses himself differently on paper. “I have a dead Grandpa Chuck who liked pigeons,” he writes. “Do you think that’s weird to like pigeons? I don’t like any birds, because when I see one then I think something bad is going to happen.”

If ontology recapitulates phylogeny in fiction -- in other words, if a writer’s learning curve resembles the necessary wisdom we all accumulate from childhood to adulthood -- then Brinkman has chosen the perfect story for a debut. With a mother’s patience, she brings Sebby step by step back into the world of the living. •

susan.reynolds@latimes.com