Visualising a Crime in the Neighborhood through the Eyes of a Child: Discovery through Experience and Language

This is precisely what Suzanne Berne achieves in her novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, 1999 Orange Prize winner. We are transported back into both the narrator’s and our own childhood – reliving experiences, including overhearing ‘incomprehensible’ adult conversations, musings about unfamiliar words and expressions, impacts of certain vivid memories and events, sibling rivalry, unusual cause-effect relations and the consequences of a lively, creative imagination. The aim of this article is to analyse Berne’s novel, considering both content and language, to examine how Berne succeeds in enabling us to visualise events and experiences in such a convincing, moving and memorable way.