To start, I am a reader with a penchant for precocious young protagonists: Esch, the pregnant, 14-year-old storyteller in Jesmyn Ward’s voluptuous Salvage the Bones; Simons Everson Manigault, from Padgett Powell’s first novel, Edisto, whose eccentric mother more than encouraged her pre-teen son’s literary genius; Salinger’s near-mythic Holden Caulfield; and my own favorite voice (probably) of all time, the also pregnant Dewey Dell Bundren’s in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, who explains herself to us by saying, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
I like them young and smart. I think children are shorter and less wrinkled adults, who observe and intuit the craziness of the lives that surround them just fine; the catch is that without the callouses created by experience, they absorb every hurt. So I appreciate the honesty and cost of their aperçus.
