Camera Obscura

The summer that changed a contented Vermont girl.

THE ROPE WALK

By Carrie Brown

Pantheon. 321 pp. $24

This coming-of-age novel begins with Alice MacCauley on the morning of her 10th birthday, as she sits on the windowsill of her bedroom, viewing the scene below through the opening of a square made by her fingers -- a make-believe camera lens, and a trope that repeats throughout the story. Alice's mother is dead, but Alice has plenty of family and people who care for her: a father, five older brothers, a Vietnamese woman who cooks and cleans, and others in the small Vermont town where Alice has lived all her young life. Alice's mother died before the girl could remember her, and she appears to accept this loss with surprisingly little trouble; her world is thick with love, and any sense of things being unsafe seems not yet to have penetrated.

This gentle, lyrical book opens outward slowly, taking its time -- sometimes too much time. But Carrie Brown, the author of Rose's Garden and Confinement, among others, is good at evoking place, and here she captures young Alice's visceral response to the physical word. Alice uses her made-up camera to sweep over the orchards and lawn and daffodils, and we feel her connection to the land itself; the world is her friend. She makes two new friends, however, and through them she begins to mature. The first is a boy her age, Theo, the grandson of MacCauley family friends who has arrived for the summer. We never see Theo's mother, who remains in New York struggling with depression and a failing marriage; and there is only a fleeting image of Theo's father, an African American musician. Theo's grandparents in Vermont have been against their daughter's interracial marriage from the start -- but here is Theo, and what can they do except tolerate him with some impatience that the young Alice notices, giving her the first glimpse that this nice couple may not be exactly who she thought they were.

When Theo's grandmother ends up in the hospital with a stroke, the boy moves into the MacCauley home and spends the summer days with Alice. He brings with him fears of terrorists, tidal waves, bird flu -- just to name a few. Alice begins to sense "the horrible truth about the world, which was that it was falling apart," yet she finds the transition a "step as ennobling as it was frightening."

The second friend that Alice makes is Kenneth, a man ill with AIDS who has come home to be cared for by his sister, Miss Fitzgerald. Alice and Theo go to the Fitzgerald home to read to Kenneth, and the descriptions of the ailing man are some of the best in the book. His eyelids have been "hitched open and pinned to the jutting brow" with bandaging tape, and we see, along with Alice, the mixture of terror and grace that resides in him. They read to him from the journals of Lewis and Clark and eventually hatch a secret plan to make a "rope walk" so that he can walk through the woods to the river, holding the rope for guidance.

The narrative weaves back and forth gently as pieces of information are filled in (Alice's mother had a cut above her eyebrow from a hail storm, just as Alice does; her brother, Wally, is a smoker and deep thinker, etc.). Some of this does not seem necessary or, at the very least, keeps the book at an unchanging pace. But then suddenly something quite amazing happens. The rope walk has an entirely different result from anything the reader -- or these young people -- expected, and the surprise is both shocking and a strange relief. Afterward, Alice really begins to grow up. The tone changes as Brown reveals an older Alice in the wonderful last part of the book, where a new note of seriousness and gravity is deeply felt.

We leave Alice decidedly more mature than she was in the opening chapter, which means decidedly less sanguine. It's not that we have to worry for her; we never did, but we're moved by the change. She has, by the end of the book, given up her make-believe camera and is taking pictures with a real one that once belonged to her mother. She's off the windowsill and on her feet. ·

Elizabeth Strout's most recent novel is "Abide With Me."