"Blind boars of wind crashed through the nervy woods," reports Jason Taylor, frightened schoolboy, as he heads toward the darker reaches of the trees, and of his imagination, in a grisly English town in 1982. "Listening's reading," he notes elsewhere, "if you close your eyes." The sounds and tastes, the trembling feelings of his world course through the wide-awake boy like channeled spirits. Yet what makes the pungent spray of syllables heart-rending is the fact that Jason is a stammerer and has to avoid certain letters even when reading aloud in class.
In Black Swan Green (Random House; 294 pages), the most...
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