Shadow Baby is a novel
narrated by twelve-year-old Clara winter, describing her short life and
speculating about her twin sister who died when they were born, in a truck
stuck in a ditch in the middle of the Minnesota winter.  Clara is a serious girl with a vivid
imagination and a serious preoccupation with language.  Her vocabulary is rich and she loves some words,
like martyr because of its four consonants in a row, and ingenuous
because of the way the "g" slides into the "enuous."  Clara wants to know about the past, such as
who was her father, or what was her dead twin sister’s name, but her mother
Tamar evades her questions.  Clara
writes fake book reports for school about non-existent novels featuring
children with hard lives in cold climates whose young siblings die.  What happens in the end?  "Read the book and find out," she
concludes.  But there is no such book.

Alison McGhee’s writing is
wonderfully spare and engaging.  It is
something of a stretch to believe that the narration really gets into the mind
of a young girl describing her friendship with an old man Georg Kominsky who
dies less than a year after they first met, but one does come to treasure
Clara’s perspective on the world.  She
repeatedly asks her mother about the past, trying different angles or phrasing
questions in different ways, and occasionally she is rewarded.  She talks with the old man, an immigrant
metal worker in his trailer, aiming to write an account of his life for a
school project.  Like her mother, he
says little, yet nevertheless his presence seems to reassure and calm her.  She keeps inventing other stories about him,
her grandfather, and even about how it would have been if her sister had lived,
but when she is with the old man, she becomes more able to focus on the
present.

With this story, McGhee manages to
portray the power of imagination and existential angst in a young girl who
seems to have difficulty finding her place in the world.  It is an outsider novel about
preteens, and in the twentieth-first century, when children now seem to be
capable of all the problems and disorders of adults, it adds a moving and
poetic perspective to the examination of childhood angst. 

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long
Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His
main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and
psychology.

Categories: Fiction