When I think of the stories in The Street of Crocodiles, I think of stories notable for their elaborate language rather than for their memorable plots. What really happens in this volume? The young narrator sees a half-idiot girl on a dump, his dog Nimrod sees a cockroach and barks at it, he sees a tramp, his father has digestive problems and takes an enema for relief, his cousin shows him some pornographic playing cards, a storm rages outside… Yet there is that extraordinary language!

One way to think of these stories is to try to understand why the narrator (not the author) uses such language. It seems to me that this adolescent boy (notice his interest in the sexual) is living a fairly ordinary, perhaps even a boring, life. I think we can all relate to that. This young boy, however, has an incredible gift. He is able to transform a drab reality into something gorgeous, fantastical, and overwhelming through his imagination, through his discovery of the power of language. Language becomes for him, and for us as readers, an instrument of augmentation. It is as elaborate as it is, as decorative as it is because the narrator uses it to embroider a dull reality. Inanimate things come alive. The simplest incident or object takes on metaphysical implications. Life enlarges through the application of the mythic and the metaphorical. As it is transformed by the boy’s imagination, life is made more interesting (sometimes made more noble or more beautiful, sometimes made more terrible or more frightening) than it really is. This is true especially of the way the boy sees his father (as, for example, an Old Testament prophet) and his father’s occupation and hobbies.

The description (or even over description) is not extraneous (or skippable!) but part of the meaning of the stories.