One of the least useful commentaries one can make about a book written in the first person by a child narrator is that the narration doesn’t sound like a child. Of course, it doesn’t! Have people who’ve made this critique ever actually listened to a child go on and on about a single specific topic? Word of advice to would-be reviewers, academics and scholars: find something else to criticize in a full-length novel told from the first-person perspective of a child narrator or else your ironic punishment might well be actually have to read a book written by an actual child narrator.
To the point: does Teddy Fitzroy’s narration in Belly Up sound anything like even one of those twelve-year-old kids who attend Harvard? Well, if it’s Harvard the kid is attending, absolutely not. (That would be even worse than reading a book narrator like an actual twelve-year-old who didn’t attend Harvard.) But back to the point: does Teddy really sound like a kid in the narration of this story? For the most part, no. But also for the most part, it’s close enough and, besides, this story is a mystery and as smart as many young kids are the plain fact of the matter is that while they occasionally attend Harvard, it is much rarer for them to be a detective on the force. This is the real issue with not just Belly Up, but all stories with kid narrators. It requires suspension of disbelief.
Most mainstream author of adult-targeted novels get around this issue by framing their stories involving child protagonists as recollections. Take To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance, since it may well be the greatest American novel ever narrated by a kid. (With apologies to Huckleberry Finn, of course.) But though Scout is telling the story while still a kid—it remains a recollection by a thirteen-year-old of events which occurred several years earlier. So while Scout may be six or seven or eight or nine in the actually narrative, her narration is that of a significantly more sophisticated teenager. Belly Up, however, is narrated in a way in which what is being narrated by Teddy seems to be happening as it is being narrated. Or very close to it, at any rate. The narration is conveyed in the past tense rather than present so obviously the events are being recollection at a later date, but unlike with Scout, for instance, there is no obviously large gap between the age of Teddy as he tells it and the age of Teddy as the events are occurring. So, in other words, Belly Up is literally being narrated by a twelve-year-old in the first person perspective. And yet, at times, the voice does seem inconsistent.
Belly Up therefore becomes an excellent example of how a writer must approach the prickly circumstances of choosing narrative perspective. The most obvious way to get around this potential problem (for some critics, anyway) would have been for the author write from the third person. That would also have opened up the opportunity to see things from the perspective of a different characters. But then that is precisely the point of the choice the author made. Belly Up is not just a mystery, after all, but a mystery in which it turns out that certain things are not as they appear. Now, this is true from the perspective of a young person under any circumstance; maturity does not allow for a full understanding of the difference between what seems to be and what really is. When you add that Teddy is pursuing a truth that other will go to extreme lengths to protect anyone from finding out, it makes much more sense for the author to have chosen to write the story from his protagonist’s limited perspective.
The choice of point of view is often underrated or misunderstood by readers. In reality, the choice of how the reader comes to see the events of a story is equivalent to being a film director who chooses the perspective of each scene. How much information the viewer is given is entirely up to the director and point of view becomes a fundamental choice with literally every cut. The writer generally does not have such control and once he commits to a perspective—especially in a book aimed toward a younger readership—he will feel pretty much set for the entire course of the story.
Belly Up is a title that itself is about perspective. It is a story about perspective. And those who criticize the perspective for not being perfect in its presentation may actually be missing a lot more about the story than they think.
