Childhood innocence doesn't crop up much these days in serious fiction. Perhaps Freud is to blame, or maybe William Golding, whose Lord of the Flies dramatized the pre-Romantic notion that young folks deprived of civilization will naturally turn into savages. Even children's books now tend to shun wide-eyed wonder and to feature instead little sophisticates dealing knowingly with various forms of family dysfunction.
Tony Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy (Little, Brown; 227 pages; $23.95), blithely and successfully counters this trend. It covers a year in the life of Jim Glass Jr., from his 10th to 11th birthdays, in the tiny...
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