The novel of childhood often involves finding one’s place in the world the institutional novel is about the ways we live in other people’s ideals, or even our own, not as legal tenants but as squatters. Mysticism easily penetrates the novel of childhood, whereas the institutional novel, even when it’s about a religious institution, tends more toward absurdity.
Novels of childhood take place in solitude, or enclosed in the love of one best friend institutional novels are about the group and about surveillance-including the surveillance post which every institution manages to set up within its inhabitants’ minds. Or perhaps that “despite” should be, “because”: We call a book a novel of childhood if it touches the keys of wonder, wandering, fleetingness if it’s about a place which holds still, which was there before the child arrived and will last long after the child escapes, we call it an institutional novel. Now, with you duly cautioned, we can continue.”ĭespite the fact that most of us spend so much of childhood navigating the institutions of our schooling, the novel of childhood and the institutional novel seem so distinct as to be opposites. Kill you, make you old, give you wings.… It’s a powerful and fickle deity, and if there’s one thing it can’t stand, it’s being reduced to mere words. It can accept you or not, shower you with gifts or rob you of everything you have, immerse you in a fairy tale or a nightmare. “… The House demands a reverent attitude.
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