Masking Frailty

Lenore Zion’s Stupid Children reads like an articulate fairy tale—like Hansel and Gretel’s child-baking witch craving a savory meal, or Jack’s giant’s (capitalist) desire for the golden egg, it takes a bewilderingly practical view of utter insanity.

The book is a first-person account from Jane, who weaves through her story a psycho-babble which illuminates only a bit more than it obscures. Jane is introduced to us first through her description of her father, a widower. Her father is an affectionate, flawed man: he repeatedly wakes pre-pubescent Jane in the middle of the night, and, citing loneliness, hauls her off to an all-night diner. This ritual, according to Jane, served to remind her father that “he was not alone, and that he had me, and he would always have me, barring some sort of tragedy that might take my life.” The threat of tragedy is an ever-looming one, because Jane inhabits a perilous world. In fairy-tale speak, the crumbs set down to guide her through the forest are being gobbled up by birds rapidly—so Jane is left to wander the woods.

And—as the tragedy-savvy reader may have predicted—Jane is ripped from her father at the age of ten when her father slits his own throat. The sight of it is a grisly after-school discovery; watching his blood drip across the kitchen floor, Jane notes that the blood is “dripping from the table’s edge, pooling in a corner of the room,” which causes her to make note of the fact that the foundation of the house is tilted.

Jane is removed from her tilted house and shipped off to a new foster home, where she is indoctrinated in the cult of the Second Day Believers. The rules of this cult are left hazy, but the reader has plenty of evidence that the whole production is batty. Balloons are shoved up the nostrils of would-be members and then inflated, to break the nose in hopes of driving out “mental impurities.” (The procedure is just different enough from what goes on in doctors’ offices throughout Hollywood to assure the reader that Jane is in immediate peril.) Cult members are numbered in order of importance within the cult: Sir One, Madam Three, etc. This methodical, logical, yet totally odd system is perhaps why Jane seems rather in her element in the cult: faux-logic meets psycho-babble. At any rate, she doesn’t seem bothered by the proceedings. Jane rises in the ranks of the cult largely due to her ability to refrain from visiting the restroom for long periods of time. Her courtship with the leader of the cult is due primarily to, as she describes it, “my ability to hold my urine for long periods of time without medical consequence.”

Stupid Children is a cerebral novel, and for this reason, it stands to reason that the primary torture— nose-cracking—occurs near the brain; a broken nose, after all, would seem to matter more to the brain than a broken toe, if proximity is correlated with importance. And Jane’s brain, however burdened with stubborn bladders and broken noses, is a delight for a reader to inhabit. Jane is not a stupid child, but she is surrounded by infantile folks. As soon as her brunch-impulsive father is removed from Jane’s life, the void is filled with cultists and a friend named Virginia. Virginia sees herself as having a “tremendous power” over small children in that she can destroy their psyche with a well-placed withering comment. She refrains from making such comments, but, Jane notes, “[T]he one thing that Virginia didn’t have the ability to recognize was that no child should be required to show gratitude to those people who fail to cause them pain.”

The novel’s title is put to use in a sharp, clever scene that portrays Jane in therapy. She tells her therapy group that she does not enjoy being around stupid children; her therapy group...