INNOCENTS (204 pp.]A. L.BarkerScribner ($2.50). SILENT CHILDREN (189 pp.)Mai Mai Sze Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).
In two books out this week, children are painted without the scrubbed sweetness their faces habitually wear on the covers of ladies' magazines.
The first is a collection of short stories which won the £500 Somerset Maugham Award in England. Under the terms laid down by Donor Maugham, the British government permits the winner to spend his prize money in foreign travel and that privilege, in currency-tight England, is a prize in itself. Novelist Evelyn Waugh acidly predicted that "elderly"...