Stephen Elliott: Happy Baby
One of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read is Jerzy Kosinksi’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird, in which a young boy wanders through Europe during World War II, hiding and shaking behind bushes, rising for savage beatings by those who find him. Stephen Elliott’s extraordinary and affecting novel Happy Baby (Picador; 191 pgs; $13), published by McSweeney’s last year and picked up for wide release in 2005, felt at times like The Painted Bird without the war.
Though both books are bracing first-person stories told by family-less, future-less boys, the comparison isn’t fair on paper. No setting compares to The Painted Bird’s after all, and its young narrator is entirely innocent while Happy Baby’s Theo courts some of his own beatings. And yet there the two characters are in the same frame of my mind—forced nomads, totally fucked—drawn together the way the lonely and battered are sometimes drawn together in life.
Happy Baby is told in reverse. Theo begins the story as a man returning to Chicago to check in on an ex-girlfriend (Maria) he’d met as a 15-year-old in a state home for wards of the court. It’s not long before the reader is witnessing Theo’s earlier life, in brief flashbacks, understanding immediately the level of grimness involved. Maria notices burns on Theo’s hands, and he remembers the more recent girlfriend who’d put them there. (“I said no and she said yes, pressing the cigarette into the back of my wrist, making a sound like the sizzle of an opium pipe. I screamed. ‘Now the other one,’ she said.”)
Over the course of the novel’s 11 chapters, there are marriages, abortions, drugs, fires, and sadomasochism. Theo tells of how his caseworker raped him. (“The windows were closed and the room was dusty and hot and filled with stacks of yellowing, creased paper forced into wide brown envelopes.”) Of his time at new juvenile centers. (“I stopped speaking for a month but nobody seemed to notice.”) Of his father. (“He pushed my kindergarten teacher down a small flight of stairs.”) Of his friends. (“‘Hard day,’ Julie says, smiling as much as she can but it doesn’t come easy to her and it looks like it’s going to tear her face.”) Of himself. (“If I could love I would have loved by now.”) And most of all, of the life in front of him. Take this unforgettable scene in which Theo, having been shivering alone on the street, escapes the bitter, bitter cold and enters the basement of a house he’s come upon. He takes off all his clothes, so that he can warm them in the basement’s dryer:
I cross my arms over my chest. I’m worried that someone will come into the basement and find me naked. Will they let me put my clothes back on or will I have to stay naked until I turn eighteen? I fold myself over the drying machine, rattling around on the blue floor. I hug it to try to quiet it down, my legs pressed against its front, and lay my cheek on the top, trying to get the heat to enter my body. The machine quivers, my clothes tossing inside of it. I stretch my arms to its back, feeling. There, the metal forms ridges like ribs that I slide my fingers between. I rub my face along the lid.
This was the scene that first brought The Painted Bird to mind: a character’s fiercely solo battle against the world as it cruelly unfolds; and his narrative tone, which is matter-of-factly ghastly.
Yet by Happy Baby’s end, cruelty and ghastliness are not the dominate feelings. Because of the novel’s reverse chronology, the reader knows that the narrator who started the novel—the 36-year-old Theo—has made it through to a safer, more human place. And while this doesn’t soften the ongoing blows to the book’s boy, it does mean that, in the end, sadness and brutality aren’t allowed to triumph. The book itself triumphs. The triumph is the story’s telling.
