Boy, Oh Boy

Frankie is an unusual six-year-old. He’s a loner. He reads the Manchester Guardian. He hates cartoons because “nobody can be flat.” And when he finds his mother’s dead body slumped in an armchair, he doesn’t cry, scream, or call the police. He sits down next to her.

Patti, his mom, is “cold as a statue in a church.” Her mouth hangs open, and she smells “like cat’s pee.” Frankie can’t see himself in the pupils of her unblinking eyes, and, the boy notes, he can’t see her in there either. Nevertheless, he covers her body in a blanket, crawls up beside it, and spends the night. Before he leaves for school the next morning, he gives her a kiss. This behaviour is but one example of a larger theme: a fascination with death. When his Uncle Jack dies, Frankie insists on attending the funeral so he can “see the hole.” Asked to imagine something wonderful, he recounts the demise of his pet mice. Is this unsettling fixation a by-product of childhood naïveté? Or is it...