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

[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