Muck, plus magic

CHILDHOOD is not a time of carefree innocence in Yannick Murphy’s work. Her 1987 debut collection, “Stories in Another Language,” showed kids grappling with a dangerous adult world whose perils included violence and incest. Her first novel, “The Sea of Trees,” centered on Tian, a 12-year-old girl held in a Japanese prison camp in Indochina; hunger and fear shaped her youthful experiences. “Here They Come” explores a similarly stark terrain, as its prepubescent narrator picks her way through the urban minefield of crumbling, bankrupt New York City during the 1970s.

In this new novel, Murphy flawlessly captures a child’s-eye view of a battered society and a battered family. The spare elegance of her prose contrasts so jarringly with the sordid physical landscape that it inspires an unsettling sense of disconnect, which is almost certainly the point. (The publisher’s beautiful packaging -- an unusual imprinted cover and handsome deep blue endpapers, rippling with art that embodies some of the story’s key images -- adds to the aesthetic provocation.) It’s clear that the writer intends to challenge us from the book’s opening sentences. “Here come the hot dog men.... [I]f they aren’t all foreign,” declares the unnamed preteen narrator, who goes on to spin a stereotypical fantasy about the men “all coming from lands with camels and beaches ... with wives with scarves up to the eyes.” The next thing we know, she’s letting one of the vendors, John, give her a Hershey bar and feel her up: “Meanwhile, the hot dogs boil, the sauerkraut warms, and the sodas cool on ice.”

Clearly, we’re not in Kansas. With her sisters, older brother and mother, the narrator inhabits a downtown loft so cold in winter that the water in the toilet freezes overnight. In the summer, “we’ve got maggots living on ooze that leaks from the garbage we keep piled in bags in our house,” she remarks. “We’ve got no private pickup and we’ve been cited for leaving a bag here and there in the metal baskets on street corners.”

The precision of revealing detail is characteristic of Murphy. These people aren’t slobs; they’re urban pioneers in a neighborhood without residential garbage collection. Their mother can’t afford to pay someone to take it away because her husband, Cal Smith, has abandoned them for “a short blonde he found on a set, porno or not, we don’t know.” Cal is a small-time filmmaker who takes whatever work comes his way. He’s also an irresponsible jerk; when his visiting children hold out their hands for the money their mother desperately needs, he laughs and drops lint from his pocket into their palms instead.

Murphy acknowledged in a prepublication interview that her book is “very autobiographical,” so there’s no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Smith children’s matter-of-fact responses to Cal’s fecklessness. It says something uncomfortable about our world that a growing body of contemporary literature nonjudgmentally portrays children trailing in the wake of adults who seem, at least to the censorious reader’s eye, completely indifferent to their obligations as parents. (The Smiths’ mother, it should be noted, is doing the best she can in trying circumstances.) “Here They Come” shares this disturbing quality with such recent works as Esther Freud’s 1992 novel, “Hideous Kinky,” and Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle.”

Yet Murphy also shares with Freud and Walls an understanding that the fears and privations of life conducted outside the social norms are sometimes mitigated by moments of unconventional magic. On one of the many occasions when the Smiths have nothing but rice for dinner, their mother suggests they “imagine each forkful a different dish.” “Camel meat tartare,” calls the narrator; as her sisters groan, their mother says thoughtfully, “You know, that may not be bad, on a hot sandy day in a tent with the flaps flapping in a wind after a hard day’s ride to nowhere and back.” When a derelict she’s befriended is too drunk to get out of the car he sleeps in, their mother drives the family down to the river, where he sobers up enough to dance with her: “[T]he skirt of her dress flies up when he spins her on the rotting wooden pier ... the sun is setting now and she points to it

Can these moments make up for a father who vanishes for months and explains when he resurfaces, “I would have called, but the phone booth always had a line a mile long”? For a mother increasingly beleaguered, especially after her own mortally ill mother arrives from France? Murphy is not the kind of writer who deals in consoling opinions -- or opinions of any kind -- about the series of disasters that she inflicts on her characters. For what little hope the novel offers, she relies on subtle though graphic indications that her protagonist is growing up. The narrator eventually declines John’s offer of a Hershey bar -- and a seat on his lap for the customary grope session -- with a polite, “No thank you.” (“ ‘I never heard you say that before,’ he says.”) She gets her first period, and her mother takes the children out to a restaurant to celebrate. Of course, on their return, a calamity befalls the family.

Despite such deliberately shocking juxtapositions and the relentless parade of catastrophic events, Murphy’s narrative is ultimately static. It’s not that nothing changes; in addition to the narrator maturing, her brother gets a job, and in the end we see the children adopting an even warier stance toward their father. But these changes are doled out in tiny portions, and the author makes us work awfully hard to discern them. She’s equally close-fisted with the volatile emotions she holds at a simmering boil: People wave guns and throw plates, but no one ever simply says, “I’m unhappy.” There’s an austere integrity to this flat-affect approach, but the distance Murphy creates between her readers and her protagonists will frustrate some.

For those willing to grant the author her chosen methods, however, there’s much to appreciate. New York at one of its lowest 20th century points comes grungily to life. You can practically feel the sweat collecting behind people’s knees in the blistering heat and smell the greasy steam from the hot dog carts on a cold day. While the Smiths remain frustratingly opaque, secondary characters have a wonderful specificity. The A&P; cashier who charges the family for only half their groceries and the school shop teacher who helps the kids build rat traps incarnate the gruff tenderness that is as much a part of big-city life as the free-floating anger stalking the filthy streets.

Most impressive of all is Murphy’s remarkable use of language, the expressive way she puts together ordinary words and images to create surprisingly lovely and moving metaphors, like the narrator’s view of their loft kingdom: “Our bags of garbage are fortress walls, the lolling cats our lions barely tamed, the empty lot out back our moat of sorts.” “Here They Come” is not necessarily an engaging book, but it is always a haunting one.