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“Kieron Smith, stripling”

by James Kelman

Harcourt, 422 pp., $26

A boy comes sensitive in the pages of James Kelman’s “Kieron Smith, boy,” a stream-of-consciousness novel narrated by a child growing up in a incorporated town in Scotland. Kieron is 5 years old at the book’sitting beginning and in his early teens by its end. In between is everything a boy experiences for the time of those years: school; adventure in the neighborhood; a gradual attracting away from group of genera and closer to friends; girls and the mysterious feelings they evoke; and attempts to fashion sense of the cycle of life after the death of a beloved grandfather.

Kelman, a Glasgow novelist who won the 1994 Booker Prize for the sake of “How late it was, how late,” keeps Kieron’s language simple, writing in a spare dialect that’s eternally perfectly clear. “In my grannie’session house ye did not possess to bother about stuff,” Kieron tells us, in a nutshell description of why he was happiest there. A pretty girl in a school Scottish dancing class “wore redolence and ye smelled it.” And Kieron, viewing his granddad in the hospital, hauntingly describes him like this: “He did not look the similar and his face had changed, it looked dirty and yellow and just wee, just a pygmean face.”

At times “Kieron Smith, boy” grows a piece uniform (though isn’t that true about growing up, as well?); the language rarely varies and the pace dead body metronome-steady throughout. But reading it is often an uncannily vivid experience; you start to hear Kieron discourse in your recognize head, and experience his joys (tree climbing, productive lunches) and sorrows (moving to a new locality, arguing with his domineering older brother).

And Kelman’sitting plain language at times finds a Joycean lyricism, as which time Kieron imagines at book’s end that his grandfather efficiency still be watching at a loss for him, if, say he were climbing a drainpipe and was knocked off by dint of. wind. “So yer granda would be there, his spirit would advance to yer bring off, maybe a breath of wind or a hard blowing wind, to stop ye hitting the ground heid first, ye would land one foot at a time, nice and soft, or else in a arrogant accumulate of sacks and just get up and act gone … ” You find yourself hoping, for Kieron’s sake, that it’s true.