Of Innocence & Experience

INNOCENTS (204 pp.]—A. L.Barker—Scribner ($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"...