Suneeta Peres Da Costa's Homework

Homework

Bloomsbury USA, $23.95 hard

If the label reads "California Sunshine," maybe that's exactly what's inside. If a man wants to escape family troubles, he may bury himself -- not in his work, but literally, under his own house. A world in which metaphors come alive is the world of magic realism, where the quotidian and the fantastic couch comfortably together. But it's also the world as seen by a young child.

Suneeta Peres da Costa's funny, touching, and remarkable first novel, Homework, is set in both these worlds. Homework recalls other novels written in the voice of a small child, notably Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Todd McEwen's Arithmetic. Only 22, an Australian of Indian parentage, Peres da Costa gives us a child's mind in an adult's language.

Protagonist Mina Pereira's voice is unique: neither childlike nor grownup, but instead by turns gravely articulate, wildly poetic, and hilariously original. For example, pleading to join the Brownies like her friends, Mina provokes that classic parental formulation, "'If Felicity Summers and Chloe Withers threw themselves down a well would you, too?'" She muses irritably: "I appreciated the philosophical principle of this trajectory, but The Well, to me, was a ludicrous, an absolutely incongruous -- and not to mention provincial -- analogy for a predicament as contemporary as mine. Where, I wondered, did they come upon these primitive references."

Mina's predicament is indeed unusual. Six years old as the book begins, she has two small feelers atop her head which gyrate and slump, stiffen and droop, with her every passing feeling. Not surprisingly, she is a social outcast. But life at home is no better. Peres da Costa wonderfully catches the younger sibling's anxious suspicion that her older sister may, appallingly, know everything. Mina suffers under a sibling who pretty much does, one who eats Kant whole at seven and writes her third-grade book report on La Nausée.

Mina's parents present a more serious problem. Early in the novel, Mina's mother undergoes an operation. Afterwards, unable to bear more children, she swells instead with madness -- obsessed with eggs, increasingly and terrifyingly birdlike. As her mother climbs trees, her father simply withdraws. "Not just downcast, but Dad could be found, literally, down," where he creates a nest beneath the house, allegedly to work on wiring, actually to eat, sleep, and hide.

As Mina approaches puberty, her family careens more precipitously toward disaster. She learns her long division lesson via her father's melancholy remark: "'Everything ... that you anticipate and live your life for brings you sorrow and loss; joy is the remainder, what is carried over.'"

In the novel's poignant conclusion, a near-adolescent Mina stands at the painful edge of adulthood, reflecting on her lost childhood and her strange, beloved mother. "On and on each one of us arrives and advances," she says, "flying with her face forever gazing at the nebulous sometimes hideous and occasionally divine shapes of the history from whose thigh she sadly slides." Just barely an adult herself, Peres da Costa has given us a haunting and magical vision of childhood.