In the mind of a child

Fiction

the everlasting story of nory

Nicholas Baker

Chatto & Windus, #12.99

BAKER is one of those intense, intellectual American writers whose books brim with innovation and totter on their own complexities, and yet his new novel is written entirely inside the mind of a nine-year-old girl, and comes complete with misspellings and the kind of involute, stilted sentences that kids of that age write and speak. This may seem an odd direction but it's not difficult to grasp Baker's reasons for taking it. Suddenly, here he is, unshackled from the need to supply a plot, to tell a coherent story; he's writing as a child and so also doesn't have to act all writerly and etch profound thoughts; errors of grammar, and structure become forgivable, in fact, are expected, and so here we should get the true Baker, the primordial Baker, no longer strung up on the airs, graces, and pretensions of contemporary fiction. Instead: we just get a big writer trying to act like a little kid,

fun but frivolous.

Nory is an American girl who has come with her parents to the lawns of Middle England. She's not an especially bright child, but she's chatty, sociable, imaginative, nice. She doesn't have a particularly difficult time adjusting to her new life or her new school, either, and it's interesting that Baker eschews such easy options for developing his thoughts.

Angst and adversity do pretty much tend to write themselves, it's the fuzzier notions that need real sensitivity. And Baker does try to take them on, he writes very neatly, sees little details very cutely.

Baker also gets the language down pretty well, the way kids start sentences halfway through, or show off and delight in the new words they've learnt by popping them into conversation at every opportunity. Baker's own ''adult'' style, however, peeks through, too, at times, ''a quease of a drive'', ''mezzo mezzo''. On one occasion in particular, Nory is trying to start a story and her first attempt is: ''Marielle was a young girl with brown hair and brown eyes who was 43in tall,'' and that seems accurate, somehow, as to how kids write, but then she goes on: ''Marielle was a quiet little girl, most of the time, very quiet, and mysterious - or not really mysterious, but if you took a little bit away from the meaning of mysterious, or add a little more to the scene in The Little Princess, an almost mysterious girl'', and this clearly is Baker's voice. It's not so much that such moments spoil enjoyment

of the book, it's just that it's difficult not to read without continuously attempting to assess how well Baker has pulled off the conceit. And, given how slight this book is, how prepossessed, that isn't perhaps an unfair criterion, for you do get the feeling that Baker is just showing off. This book isn't so much an analysis or an excursus, as a creative writing exercise. It's frequently funny but, ultimately, it leaves you only with a reaction along the lines of ''boy, aren't kids kooky'' or ''isn't Baker a very smart writer?''