Young at heart

Langley says childhood is a foreign country that can never be revisited, only recalled

5 April 2012

Childhood is a foreign country where we all once lived. It can never be revisited, only recalled: the baffling rules, the tricks of survival, the cruelties, losses and discoveries. The moments of joy.

We forget the way the world looks, viewed from the perspective of the small person. Grown-ups can be harsh, indifferent, stifling, needy, glamorous. The mind of a child is not a comfortable place to be.

JD Salinger gave us the definitive guided tour for his time with The Catcher In The Rye. Today's children are less innocent, though often just as lost. In five new collections of short stories - four American, one European - the authors lead us through the shifting sands of this hazardous terrain.

Julie Orringer's How To Breathe Underwater (Viking, £10.99) is a strikingly accomplished first book: there are pages here that had me drymouthed, toes curling with anxiety, in a story that shows just how many ways there are not to look after a six-year-old girl on an outing by the sea.

The darkness is blessedly lightened deadpan humour. In a hostile-world the spirit of Salinger lives: a fat girl meets her beautiful, monstrously egotistical cousin. 'I told her I knew she was named after a character in a Verdi opera. Aida licked the chocolate from her lips and folded the silver wrapper. "I'm not named after the character," she said, "I'm named after the entire opera."

In Pilgrims, a brother and sister slip away from a creepy, vegetarian, mantra- chanting Thanksgiving dinner to find the host's children reinventing Lord Of The Flies in the suburban backyard.

In Orringer's world, mothers sicken, die, run away; absent parents loom large, children fumble their way through the dark wood of life.

You can't read her uninvolved; she engages the heart. What her characters are up to, fundamentally, is learning to breathe in an alien element, learning to survive.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer (Canongate, £9.99) is a dazzler of a debut which gives us the childhood battlefield from a black perspective. A troop of Brownies who convince themselves they heard the word ' nigger' plan revenge on the newly arrived troop of pale, blonde girls, and find themselves disconcertingly wrong-footed.

A schoolboy collects his hopeless father from jail and is farcically caught up in the Million Man March in Washington DC, where his old man plans to sell his tropical bird collection among the crowd.

Packer zooms in on the crumbling hinterlands of Atlanta, Baltimore, Louisville; the tyranny of small-town church and chapel. Her words sing and soar; her characters take possession of the narrative and pull the reader in.

Like Orringer, she can be exhilarating, hilarious and heartbreaking. The kick is in the detail.

Short People (Heinemann, £12.99) is Joshua Furst's debut; ten stories that focus on childing-hood with a less visceral, more intellectualised approach.

Nine-year- old Shawn, baptised, born again in Christ, is mortified to find 'nothing has changed. He's the same'. But something has changed and Shawn gradually becomes a monster, wrecking the lives of his parents in his endless pursuit of perfection.

In the penultimate story Furst reveals a pattern that changes how some of the earlier stories are viewed - a self-consciously literary device redundant in a subtle, richly textured book.

Children and beasts of all sorts dominate Hannah Tinti's first book, Animal Crackers (Review, £10.99), a quirky, often disturbing collection. Hers is a world where things are jarringly out of kilter, a world of transformation, casual violence and twisted feelings.

A sad man works at a zoo washing the elephant, dreambyof other lives; a boy plays sadistic games with his pet rabbit; a woman keeps a boa constrictor in her living room, feeding it live mice and hamsters; three giraffes present a petition to demand an improved quality of life. Animals and humans alike, Tinti gets under their skin.

Short stories from new writers are usually the prelude to a 'bigger', in size terms, novel. These stories bring us confident new voices from across the Atlantic. Is there a future Roth or Atwood among them? Make a note of the names.

Rachel Seiffert's Field Study (Heinemann, £12.99) is the odd one out here. Seiffert was born in England, Australian father, German mother. Her first novel, The Dark Room, was shortlisted for the Booker, and this is her first collection of stories, with settings as diverse as a bleak Scottish seaside resort, post-communist East Germany, a dangerous, unnamed European frontier, a deserted valley with the look of a fairy tale.

Where the American stories are rooted in the reality of here and now, Field Study spreads over time: a desperate mother during World War II carries her children to safety as she swims across a river in flood, an old man returns to Berlin in search of the past.

This is an established writer meditating on guilt, love, loneliness and death. After years languishing in the shadow of long fiction, the short story, it seems, is flourishing.