The Strange Children

By Caroline Gordon Old friends have convened at the Tennessee home of Sarah and Steve Lewis. Their gathering, witnessed and recorded solely by Lucy, Sarah and Steve’s nine-year-old daughter, involves the happenings, both usual and unusual, which can encompass everyday life: reminiscences of good and interesting times in the tropics of St. Tropez; dinner preparations and party games; livestock inspections and examinations of conscience; religious revivals and hints of infidelity. Yet beneath the stillness of the surface simmers a fundamental tension of life—the tension between authentic purpose and agnosticism, between a life divinely ordained in a particular direction and one of wandering across “a darkling plain.” Rid me, and deliver me from the hand of strange children, whose mouth speaketh vanity… (Psalm 144) The second of two novels Caroline Gordon wrote after her conversion to the Catholic faith, The Strange Children was deemed “a beautiful book” by Flannery O’Connor, thanks to