Joanna Scott: Make Believe

PEOPLE DIE ALL the time, some before they're done raising their kids. In less litigious times, grandparents from one side or the other would get stuck finishing the job, or maybe an aunt would. Now grandparents regularly go to court to claim children who are not theirs, gain access to kids cut off by bad family relations or divorce, and even to bioengineer grandkids from the genetic material of offspring who inexcusably died without procreating. But the legions of grandparents who are raising babies their irresponsible children left behind might be cautioned to be careful what they wish for. Some tired old people aren't especially well-equipped for bringing up 21st-century youth.

In Make Believe, Joanna Scott suspends a small boy between two sets of grandparents, neither ideally suited to raising the toddler left behind when his teen alcoholic mother dies in a car accident and his father is shot in a gang scuffle. Since his mom lived with the family of her dead boyfriend, her boy, Bo, goes to them. They are a decent, loving black family, but they're aged.

The other set of grandparents is white and uptight and wants nothing to do with their illegitimate grandson, until one day when the step-grandfather is seized by an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility and hires an expensive lawyer to secure custody of the kid. Never mind that he drove the child's pregnant mother from his house a few years back, or that he and his wife have a teenage daughter still at home, reminding them of why raising kids can be so thankless and difficult. They still tear Bo from his only known family and install him in theirs. It is then they realize that--shared genes aside--they don't really like him.

Scott, whose previous novel The Manikin was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, tells this story from every possible point of view, in no particular chronological order. She begins with Bo's animalistic, nearly incomprehensible mental warblings ("Do you know me? Ya ya ya! Play with me please! You can be whatever you want. I'll be a wolf. You bad, get away!"), which might serve as a blanket warning to all writers: Avoid first-person narratives by characters less than five years old. She then moves back and forth in time, and between characters, as the boy's grandparents (all four), parents (both dead), and varied minor figures, including a fox standing in a ditch, offer their perspectives on the situation. Even in their own voices, these folks come off as pathetic or unlikable. The most intriguing member of this family constellation is Bo's father, whose death is rendered in a minute-by-minute diary countdown that explains what was previously noted many chapters back: He died.

There is good writing here. Scott's pen is highly poetic, and she comes up with some memorable images. Bo's doomed parents' unlikely love for one another is described as "something like a gust of wind that catches a leaf as it falls from a tree and spirals it upward." Yes, love is just like that.

But other matters can't be clarified by all the poetry in the world. For instance, why is Bo torn from his known family and handed over to white strangers in an age when the courts prefer to place children of color in households of color? Why not a dual custody arrangement here, or at least visitation rights for the noncustodial grandparents? Why doesn't a social worker monitor this awkward placement? Why don't the police or neighbors speak up when Bo begins to run away from home nearly daily, and is retrieved by strangers, neighbors, and law enforcement personnel? Scott seems determined to punish Bo, and she won't let reality deter her from the task.

Ultimately, only one message comes through clearly in this muddled book, and it's not exactly a literary one: Parents, decide who should get your kids in the event of your death. Now, while you still have a say in the matter.