I Know Some Things

Stories About Childhood by Contemporary Writers

edited by Lorrie Moore

Faber & Faber, 256 pp., $13 (paper)

I Know Some Things is edited by Lorrie Moore, who is as astute and sensitive an editor as anyone could ask for. Still, capturing a child’s point of view is often an act of genius or a parlor trick. Several stories in this volume (most notably those by Spalding Gray and Richard McCann) don’t seem to fit the bill. Almost every story focuses on a major adult figure seen or remembered through the eyes of a child. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that one must have a taste for this kind of thing; many agree with Wordsworth that a child’s vision has more honesty than a woman’s or a man’s. Still, there are outstanding stories in this collection that demonstrate the difference between the view of the adult and that of the child. It would take a cruel reader to take umbrage with Alice Munro and Jamica Kincaid. But reading this collection in one sitting is, well, repetitious. Perhaps too many writers have accepted too many clichés about the ways children view the world; it’s difficult to ferret the clichés out from the finer insights in this collection.

This article appears in November 3 • 2000.

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