BELL CALL by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 317 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.
Feed a husky three-year-old at the breast? Keep an intelligent seven-year-old illegally out of school on the tendentious grounds that he hasn't yet asked to go? Permit children to defecate on the floor, Or break up the chairs in a rented, furnished house? Even the most dogmatically permissive parent or psychologist would certainly draw the line. Yet Tarl Pracket, the strange antiheroine of Bell Call, brings up her children just like that—and such is the hallucinatory power of the author that for brief...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
