CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS

SUZANNE BERNE'S NOVEL OF YOUTHFUL SLEUTHING, SET IN THE YEAR OF WATERGATE

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 29, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

The first-person narrator, in other words, has the remembered soul of a child but also the words now to capture it, and ``A Crime in the Neighborhood'' consequently evokes other such delicate balancing acts -- Scout in ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' say, or the young voice of Alice McDermott's ``That Night,'' or Carson McCullers's Frankie in ``Member of the Wedding.'' Certainly a similar heat-drenched foreboding hovers over this story, which takes place during a few months in a suburb of Washington, D.C., when Nixon was just beginning his public plummet, Marsha's family fell apart, and a 12-year-old boy was found murdered near the neighborhood mall.

Boyd Ellison was a kid Marsha didn't know all that well -- he'd tortured a bug once, and tried to appropriate her glasses, and manifested the other not very likable traits that neighborhood boys will do. This near-middle distance makes his death in the novel more a symbolic plague than a personal horror: The Eberhardts don't have to grieve his death so much as absorb it, the stunning proof of a precarious world. Not that theirs was rose-colored before the boy disappeared. On the verge of that summer, Marsha had watched at dinner one night as her mother picked up a plate and ``sailed it like a Frisbee'' in the direction of an unfaithful husband. If Larry Eberhardt's affair was commonplace, his accomplice wasn't, for he was about to run off with his wife's younger sister, Ada.

The three Eberhardt children -- Marsha and her 14-year-old twin siblings, Julie and Steven -- respond to this mayhem with the usual confused angst of children, displacing or blaming or pretending the whole fracture in their lives is a temporary disturbance. Less sanguine, Lois Eberhardt evolves overnight into mother-bear mode, cleaning out the near-languishing joint bank accounts and bringing in her other two sisters for reinforcements. She takes a job selling magazines over the phone, maniacally cleans the attic, watches Watergate unfold on the evening news with grim conviction. Clearly her mother's daughter, Marsha undertakes a similar vigilance -- she begins to keep an ``evidence'' journal, wherein she logs every meaningless event she observes in the neighborhood. None of this sentinel duty can prevent the tragic consequences of that summer, which to Marsha's young mind are all connected: an epidemic of irreparable breaks and disappearances, whether lost boys or wayward fathers or giving up the past.

And yet Marsha knows now that the events of that summer set the compass for the next decades -- that ``mistakes are where life really happens'' -- and that her father was an ordinary man reaching, perhaps foolishly, for a last chance at the extraordinary. ``He was a mostly mild man with a weakness for passion, a suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any sort of balancing grand intellect or ironic world view.'' It takes an adult to know that much, and a writer of Berne's graciousness of style to convey it. ``A Crime in the Neighborhood'' is an elegantly told story, possessing enough psychic energy to take a few awful occurrences and weave from them a tapestry of memory and longing. Berne tries too hard to work the Watergate metaphor -- I am weary of such recent-history, flickering-TV images, which tend to march around in fiction these days wearing sandwich boards, announcing America's fall from grace. And she has that roaming narrator's tendency to go where she doesn't belong, then explain it with the clunky device of ``I imagine.'' This is a common failing of first novels, particularly after the coup de grace delivered the omniscient narrator in recent years, but it rings metallic to the ear. Either stay out of the rooms where you couldn't have been, or find a better way to describe them than fanciful guesswork.

But ``A Crime in the Neighborhood'' is captivating on its own merits, for Marsha's young blundering heart is conveyed with such accuracy that one easily, gladly accompanies her through her summer of destitution. Armed to the hilt with stubborn anger at both her parents, she turns her Holmesian sights on an oddball neighbor in the wake of Boyd Ellison's unsolved murder. She is the lost child searching for the truly lost child, wishing, more than anything, for the fathers on the Neighborhood Watch patrol to find them all and keep them safe. And she is that perfect amalgam of childhood, a combination of innocence and carelessness for whom moral reckoning is as foreign as Nixon's malfeasance. So we are given this story through the iconography of a 10-year-old sleuth: the thrilling minor perversions of children, the ``marvelous depravity'' of vandalized Barbie dolls and old memories that have nowhere to live.

Unless you're a writer, of course, in which case everything is useful and fair game. All grown up, Marsha Eberhardt has kept her vigilant skills of observation but seasoned the yearnings into something wiser -- or at least more realistic -- than the vast worries and unmet hopes of a young girl. ``A Crime in the Neighborhood'' resonates with those fragile necessities of life, keenly aware of the scent of newly mown lawns and the dangers that might land on any one of them.

A child has gotten lost. The grammatical construction of this statement baffled me. Who had lost the child? Had he lost himself? Could you lose a child the same way you could lose the car keys? Even then I was something of a determinist, as most children are; I believed that things were lost for a reason. Perhaps God collected lost things for his own benefit, keeping them until you died, when whatever you had lost would be returned to you. I imagined heaven lined with shelves, a celestial pawnshop. All it took was a moment's carelessness, I told myself, and you could lose anything. I didn't understand the implications of this observation, but I remember the thrill that ran up my spine, composed mostly of gratification at being, for the moment, predictably where my mother would look for me.

SUZANNE BERNE

From ``A Crime in the Neighborhood''