Babble

by Jonathan Baumbach

Babble  is a humorous novel-in-stories of a baby’s life. The stories are told from the baby’s point of view, transcribed by his father, yielding at least a slightly unreliable narrator. The baby leaves home, wears disguises, and searches for those who might change his diapers. It is a unique coming-of-age story about (1) loss of innocence, (2) rites of passage, (3) family life, (4) babies, (5) baby-sitters, (6) war and peace, (7) robots, (8) raw youth, (9) crime and punishment, (10) stories, (11) sex and death, (12) language, (13) advanced education, (14) love, (15) the invention of culture, (16) mystery, (17) play, (18) fathers and sons, (19) superheroes, (20) the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood.

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. Married Annette Grant (fourth wife) on Dec. 18, 2004. Former wives: Naomi Miller, Elinor Berkman, Georgia Brown. Children: David, Nina, Noah and Nico. A.B (English) Brooklyn College, MFA (Playwriting) Columbia University, Ph.D (English and American Lit), Stanford University. Fellowships include Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Merrill. Invented in 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America; reinvented in 1988 as FC2. An unintentionally well-kept secret among contemporary American novelists. Author of 14 books of fiction

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This is a baby book. A cartoon ; built with 2D characters. None of you will Like it. I'm off soon to more Baumbach (if that's not a Waken name!)

From the backmatter (who don't read this stuff first?) the first 12 Fiction Collective titles ::

Reruns (my next Baumbach, but with different cover ; 1st ed.) :: 11 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Museum by B.H. Friedman :: 0 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Twiddledum Twaddledum by Peter Spielberg :: 3 Ratings · 1 Review
Searching for Survivors by Russell Banks (a famous guy!) :: 17 Ratings · 2 Reviews
The Secret Table by Mark Mirsky :: 1 Rating · 0 Reviews
98.6 by Sukenick (read this one!) :: 31 Ratings · 4 Reviews
The Second Story Man by Mimi Albert (the FC edition of this not even in the gr=db!) :: 0 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Things In Place by Jerry Bumpus :: 0 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Reflex And Bone Structure by Clarence Major (a name familiar from my recent reading on US=lit history) :: 15 Ratings · 1 Review
Althea :: 0 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Babble by our BaumBach :: 7 Ratings · 0 Reviews
Temporary Sanity by Thomas Glynn :: 7 Ratings · 1 Review
and ;; Statements 2: New Fiction (apparently Statements 1 is not in the gr-db).

I think the numbers speak. I think them not unrelated to the numbers we received this past Tuesday. If the USofA were friendly to alternative forms of social and economic organization, we wouldn't have had Tuesday's results as even a remote possibility. But most of us spend our working lives in fascisticly structured environments ; think it normal that of course the boss has a right to keep on eye on us and how we use computer time (the computer belongs to him!) at work. But democratically organized collectives? that would be a different matter. Fight the power! Read Fiction Collective/FC2!!!

Jonathan Baumbach is co=founder of Fiction Collective ; and of its reinvention, FC2.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Senior Baumbach is my ONLY Baumbach.

[Vel Veeter]

I don’t know if Jonathan Baumbach is a good person. I do know that his character in “The Squid and the Whale” is one of the most convincing, horrifying, and fully realized portrayals of a kind of dad that I have ever seen. He confirms everything I would have thought about every contemporary writer who has more talent than success (at least in their own minds).

I also never knew if he was any good as a writer. His kind of work is the kind that is destined to fade away, and there are lots of writers working today whose work will also face the same kind of future.

Recently though, I found an imprint who started republishing his work and because they work with Scribd, I have access to it.

This book. This book is so good. It’s a hilarious kind of “novel” and though it’s fiction and a novel it feels much more like something else altogether. The premise here is a new father, an intellectual and storyteller, who is constantly distracted by his son who he refers to as “The Baby” as a hilarious and increasingly absurd set of interactions. He’s trying to write serious essays while the baby comes to interrupt him. So he allows himself to “listen” to the babble the baby chortles out and creates hilarious stories out of the nonsensical language of the baby. The stories play upon conventional storytelling tropes and become more and more absurd. And they are all hilarious. This is a really really funny and charming book, where an intelligent narrator gives over to his love for the ridiculous little creature who lives in his house.

[🐴 🍖]

as a former baby myself, this spoke to many of my concerns. was it goofy? bien sûr, but then again who in 2018 HASN'T been stalked and made to cry by a robot? cast of characters resembles those fisher-price little people with pegs for bodies (why was the dog the same size as everyone else?) but they kiss and go to war and make b.m. just like us. batman becomes bathman becomes buttman (cf. "landslide" by fleetwood mac)... scatological, with a definite de-emphasis on "logical," but heartfelt. recommended

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

On my journey through the 70s output of Fiction Collective I decided to take on Babble as my introduction to the work of Jonathan Baumbach. This short work writes from the perspective of an academic writer who is documenting the stories his baby is telling him. These stories are what you'd expect a child to tell and the way in which they are written emulates how a child speaks and thinks.

Superheros, robots, and soldiers populate the characters of these stories and operate on the two dimensional archetype that comes with a child's understanding of them. These stories are absurd and surreal, offering a nonsensical plot that feels quite like reading Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland. This book can be a lot of fun and definitely is entertaining. Baumbach has really mastered how to emulate a child's thought process and speech.

This being said, similar to listening to a child tell a story. It is often entertaining but also usually pretty forgettable. There are some chapters that really stand out in this book but many of them pass by without much real impact on the reader aside from present action entertainment. This is ultimately what keeps me from rating this higher. Chapters like "Spooky in Florida" and "Baby Takes an Advanced Degree" are the real standouts for me. While I liked a lot of what was presented here I'm already forgetting much of what was written.

I also found that the gimmick of writing like a child started to wear thin pretty early on, considering how short this book is it really shows how this idea doesn't have much in terms of legs to stand on. I think this concept would have worked best as a short story as some of the chapters really just start to tread the same ground as earlier ones. The last three chapters do look to expand on this idea and showcase growth and development of a child but I was already feeling fatigued by this concept much earlier on in the book.

This book really reminded me of the work of Richard Brautigan. Often Brautigan's writing is described as having a childlike innocence and wonder. While I enjoy both this book and the work of Brautigan for similar reasons I do think there is a clear distinction here. Brautigan may offer a childlike writing style but his concepts have a much deeper understanding of emotion and storytelling. He clearly is an adult who is writing in a style that is his, whereas Babble feels like a gimmick. Baumbach is writing in a style that he has created to portray this concept, giving an intended effect.

For this reason its hard to make concise judgement of Baumbach as a writer with this as an introduction. It's clear that he is quite talented for being able to write so convincingly in this way but its not a great example of what he is capable of. If anything this has peaked my interest in Baumbach and has me wanting to read more.

P.S. I found it quite entertaining all of the different ways Baumbach found to describe the baby sucking its thumb.

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shockingly horrible.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extra star for the season. Otherwise, sporadically amusing and slapdash.

[laila* · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is like if naked lunch was good