The lost boys

It’s an exercise in envy, watching your young child. Not envy because the child is carefree and you are not. That’s what the jokers say, but they get it all wrong. They forget that every child—every human—has his worries and that childhood is serious to a child. No, envy because your child might still do what you did not. Your child might be the one human who pays attention during his childhood, who appreciates and remembers it. You didn’t. No one does. And now, as an adult—this is the secret that binds all humans—the one thing you would most want is to return to childhood, to your very specific childhood, this time with your eyes open. This time, to savor what was good and to confront what was bad.

Keith Donohue manages something like an eyes-open return to childhood in his magical and powerful debut novel, “The Stolen Child.” It is an unsettling and gorgeously written tale of two boys who are forced out of their childhoods too early. Their struggles to return will rend your heart. After all, we were each of us stolen children once. We grew up. A parallel world Part of the power of “The Stolen Child” is that Donohue means the title literally, if fantastically. His tale is built around the myth of the changeling, a myth found in cultures around the world. It depends on there being a parallel race of magical beings, human in form but wild and wily. You might think of them as sprites or fairies, but Donohue settles on “hobgoblins.” These beings extend their race by capturing human children whom they transform into goblins like themselves. For every child stolen, a goblin returns to human life by taking that child’s place. Don’t worry about the hows: The goblins can remake their faces and voices to double for anyone, and parents are usually none the wiser. Having read “Peter Pan,” you might think that the stolen children would be thrilled to become goblins, able to do magic and to never grow old. But Donohue’s insight is that it is the goblins who are unhappy. At the start of his novel, a goblin has replaced Henry Day, a 7-year-old boy in rural America who runs away from home one day. It is 1949, and Henry’s house is on the edge of a forest that has been home to a dozen goblins for hundreds of years. The boy Henry Day becomes the goblin Aniday. And his replacement, a goblin who has waited a hundred years since his own snatching to be human again, becomes the new Henry Day. But there are hitches. Aniday cannot entirely forget his human family. The new Henry Day is haunted by his lost human childhood, when he was a piano prodigy named Gustav. And at least some of the adult humans do know something is wrong .

Why you’ll be moved
If your child is not your own, but a goblin returned to human life, then you can’t very well be expected to care for it, can you? The changeling myth has been used to excuse the neglect of so-called different children for centuries, as Donohue explains. But what if the childhood you are living is not your own? What if you are not you? Aniday and Henry Day both try to reclaim themselves, and you will be touched and troubled by what they do. But expect, too, to be troubled for yourself, to wonder what it is you missed. It is yourself you mourn for.‘The Stolen Child’ **** out of four stars By Keith Donohue Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 336 pages, $23.95