Do you find child narrators—their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices—endlessly absorbing? You are well on your way to loving Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows (1956) if so. It is a tour de force of child narration, able to capture the child’s ability simultaneously to normalize difficult circumstances and to convey awareness of the unconventional chaos of her life.

The Fountain Overflows charts the precarious experience of the four Aubrey children as they weather the ups and downs of their highly educated but impecunious parents during “the age of plenty which ended with the first world war.” It opens in medias res: “There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my Mamma and my Papa were ever going to speak to each other again.” The Mamma and Papa in question are Clare Aubrey, former concert pianist, highly cultured, and long-suffering, and Piers Aubrey, a compulsive gambler and erratic political journalist who can’t keep a job. Young Rose Aubrey is the narrator. She, her twin sister Mary, their slightly older sister Cordelia, and baby brother Richard Quin make up the family at the center of this novel.

The children’s comprehension of their parents’ argument is poised between a perception of the potentially cataclysmic nature of this “long pause,” and the faulty child-reasoning of the next sentence: “Not that I feared they had quarreled, only we children had quarrels, but they had each fallen into a dream.” Rose Aubrey’s summation of their charming but highly unreliable father exemplifies her double vision: “I had a glorious father; I had no father at all.”

Piers Aubrey’s homewrecking unscrupulousness cannot be swept under the rug. In the novel’s first chapter he sells the furniture in his family’s flat while they’re away. The black sheep of an Anglo-Irish gentry family, he is touchingly nostalgic for the genteel world of his childhood yet incapable of providing the same stability for his own children, dragging them around the globe (South Africa, Scotland, and, for most of the novel, a dingy south London suburb) from one impoverished situation to another. As irresponsible and intemperate as he is, however, he is often righteous, occasionally compassionate, capable of charming other people (even a member of Parliament he blackmails!) as well as his children, and his long-suffering wife.

The children are in part able to normalize their lives with their father through their shared culture. While Rose is nominally the singular narrator, “we” statements appear roughly as often as “I” statements. Through one family crisis after another—even the final catastrophe—the novel’s refrain is “we always thought that everything in the end was going to be all right.” They simultaneously know and don’t know how awful their situation is, how their family is pitied and shunned; they are highly aware of the ordinary indignities of childhood (“an embarrassing state”). They are at times mordantly knowing—“we were experts in disillusion,” Rose comments. And very occasionally, they allow themselves to feel and to express an understandable anger at their lot. In one of the novel’s few allusions to its title, the reader learns that “we had become fountains of rage and pain.” But at bottom they remain insanely resilient. It is “humiliating” being a child (“adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise”); it is fantastic being a child.

Rebecca West is master of that cat-like sentence structure. Her sentences are both sinuous and off-kilter, and very often very funny.

The Fountain Overflows was the first of a projected trilogy intertwining the history of the Aubrey family with the history of the 20th century. Drafts of the subsequent volumes were published after West’s death in 1983 as This Real Night (1984) and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Though a best-seller in its day, it has long been overshadowed by West’s slim, stunning World War I novella, The Return of the Soldier (1918) and her massive book on the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). That is a pity, because it strikes me as the best evocation of an unconventional early 20th-century childhood I have ever read.

The Aubrey children are capable of finding magic and wonder even amid their endlessly embarrassing state. On the one hand, the novel is committed to the children’s perception of their dingy ordinary: the flakes on their leather furniture are described in loving detail. But uncanny supernatural occurrences happen without a break in the fabric of the narrative! The house of the children’s cousin Rosamund is beset with violent poltergeists. While Rose marvels at “all this possessed ironmongery,” she doesn’t seem categorically surprised or disbelieving that such a thing should happen. Rose herself experiences a brief interlude of supernatural power, when at her friend Nancy’s house she discovers (but again, seems not a bit surprised) that she can read minds. Effortlessly: she asks a friend to think of a number, puts her hands on the friend’s face, and “up it came, slowly and clumsily, like a wheelbarrow being trundled out of a dark stable, fifty-three.”

The natural and the supernatural are countenanced in this book as equal. More sordid and sensational things happen too: Nancy’s mother is murdered by her father, involving the whole Aubrey family in the outcome of the trial (as well as occasioning an introduction to “the first fountain pen we had ever seen”). Again, there is no rending of the fabric of the novel; one doesn’t feel that the novel has violated a generic code. We take our cue from the child-narrator’s embrace of the weird but normal-to-them life they lead, from a father who sells the furniture from under them, to poltergeists who wreck the house, to murder, to magical imaginary animals in a real stable.

I marvel at Rebecca West’s ability to hold together the double vision of the Aubrey children’s world. West’s prose yokes grittiness and magic together. Her fountain pen overflows with arresting similes. Rose’s mind-reading “like a wheelbarrow … out of a dark stable” is one such moment. Another is this description of cousin Rosamund: “There was a golden heaviness about her face, to look on it was like watching honey drop slowly from a spoon.” West’s sentence structure also captures beautifully the transitions in the children’s perceptions. Almost every sentence in the novel seems perfect, even when—especially when—they feature (like the one just quoted) awkward run-on structures, commas stringing together complete independent clauses.

In an essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) called “The Strange Necessity” (1928), West declares that sentences are the fundamental “architecture” and origin of language: “They, and not words, are the foundations of all language.” Here’s her proof: “Your cat has no words, but it has a considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence.” (I love my cat, but I do not think he has this feeling.) In The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West is master of that cat-like sentence structure. Her sentences are both sinuous and off-kilter, and very often very funny.

Does everything turn out all right in the end, as the children constantly tell each other? In keeping with the rest of the novel, they are both aware and unaware of the ways they’ve matured by its final pages. Rose is acutely aware of how Rosamund has changed, yet she cannot really notice change in herself. Rather than the novel ending with an epiphany that reveals the protagonist’s destiny as an artist (James Joyce style), Rose suddenly realizes “that for me it would be impossible … it was idiotic that I should become a musician. I had no musical gift save those which had been transmitted to me by my mother. … I did not want to be a musician.”

Nonetheless, there are epiphanies and then there are epiphanies: two paragraphs later, after playing some Schumann duets with her sister, Rose admits “I was a musician in my own right, though I could not yet say to what degree.” Rose’s fierce willingness to chuck the whole thing resonates with the exhilaration of letting go of a script that’s been written for you, that you’ve been holding onto closely, even for a moment. It is a scary part of growing up; it is a natural part of growing up.