Reviewed by: Happy Baby Lania Knight Happy Baby by Stephen ElliottMacAdam/Cage and McSweeney’s Books, 2004, 207 pp., $21 After living for a year on the rooftop of a convenience store at the age of twelve, Stephen Elliott became a ward of the state of Illinois from age thirteen to eighteen. Happy Baby, Elliott's fourth novel, is rich with images informed by his time on the streets and his years in juvenile homes. It tells the story of Theo, a young man who has emerged emotionally scarred from the child welfare system of Chicago. Elliott explored violence, emptiness and the unceasing search for love in his first three novels, Jones Inn, A Life Without Consequences and What It Means to Love You. Happy Baby shares these themes with Elliott's earlier novels, yet its narrative strategy is unusual—a series of linked stories, or chapters, arranged in reverse chronological order. The narrative relates Theo's journey in reverse: it begins at the endpoint. From the apex of adulthood, the story follows a circular path back in time, offering ever sharper views of the events that have ravaged a young man's life. Amazingly, though, the life story detailed in Happy Baby never becomes something as simple and clear-cut as a narrative of cause and effect. Instead of withholding the knowledge of what will happen to Theo until the end, Happy Baby begins with Theo as a free man. Complete attention is devoted to the unfold-ing details of Theo's childhood confinement and the life he creates after release from Chicago's juvenile detention centers. The payoff of this narrative form is huge, as Elliott offers unflinching glimpses of mutilation and abuse that are nevertheless suffused with hope. It is Elliott's ability to combine a raw account of abandonment, an unending quest for belonging and an utter lack of easy explanations or solutions that makes his fourth novel so haunting and complicated. Distressing confessions casually punctuate Happy Baby. In the opening scene, Theo is on a plane to Chicago. He observes with detachment the blisters on his hands. His dominatrix girlfriend in California, Ambellina, burned him with cigarettes when he told her he'd be gone for a week. In the closing lines of the first chapter, Theo is admiring ex-girlfriend Maria's baby and thinks to himself, "I wish I was violent and capable of the things people are capable of when they don't care whether or not they get caught. [End Page 174] There would be blood everywhere." Violent thoughts like these about a baby in the arms of a woman he still loves typify the conflict within the main character, and within the novel as a whole. Elliott is able, within single sentences, to convey pain, resignation and the strange urgency of hope. In chapter two, Theo confesses, "I'm wearing women's underwear and leather pants at the 16th Street BART station, worried that someone will see me when Ambellina gets off the train." With a spare twenty-five words, Elliott has blended public humiliation and dignity unapologetically in a razor-sharp setting. Another strength Elliott displays in Happy Baby is Theo's voice. It devolves because of the narrative inversion of time, changing almost imperceptibly from that of a scarred yet somewhat peaceful adult to that of a confused boy trying to make sense of an unpredictably dangerous childhood. What fills Theo's head in the initial chapters—sex infused with violence, fluid self-negotiations about the value of life—transform into repeated experiences of rape in a forced exchange for protection, unsteady alliances with other boys locked within the system and wire mesh and metal bars that hide delinquent youth from an uncaring urban population. Happy Baby is anything but what the title suggests. Theo tries but is unable to cross the boundary between his own anguished self and the innocent beauty of a babe in arms. Ultimately, the source of both the pleasure and the pain of Stephen Elliott's novel is the author's willingness to recognize that distance, the chasm between the flaws of the self and the perfection of what the self once was...
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Jan 1, 2006
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