The Book of Knowledge

"The Book of Knowledge" takes its title from the timeworn encyclopedia of the same name, and its style reflects a nostalgia redolent of cracking a musty encyclopedia long untouched on a grandfather's shelf. It is a novel set during the 1920s through the 1940s, and chronicles the lives of four youths through crucial incidents in their lives. Stories with children as protagonists are inherently fraught with twin dangers, one, that of adopting the unripened perspective of childhood to such a degree that the prose seems precious, or two, that the characters are drawn from such an adult perspective that they don't seem recognizable as children. Grumbach avoids both dangers, and it is testament to her skills as a novelist that her most convincing passages in this book are those which convey the moments of discovery and innocence lost with such precision and delicacy that her characters seem utterly, convincingly, real. This despite the fact that there are some mannerisms that are distracting; perhaps owing to the period in which the novel is set, Grumbach resorts to such occasional rhetorical conceits like "So it was that..." which intrude upon the reader as artificial. But these incidences are minor, and one finishes this novel with a sense of empathy, and with a vividness of shared experience with her troubled characters