Can good intentions lead to harmful choices? Can bad intentions result in good things happening? When faced with an unprecedented situation, it may be impossible to tell what the right action to take is. Maybe all you can do is fall back on yourself and act out of instinct, even if that instinct leads you astray. This is a dilemma posed by Robert Lieberman’s 1981 novel Baby.
It all starts with Doris Rumsey, a middle aged grammar school librarian in Ithaca, New York. As she approaches retirement she has to live with the unfortunate truth that she will never marry and have children. Aside from being post-menopausal, she also has a hunchback. But she is a kind woman who has a way with children who see through her deformity and love to visit her in the library.
In the depths of her depressing existence, Doris’s life turns around when she miraculously gives birth to a girl. Doris starts calling her Baby and so the name sticks. Even more unusual than the anomaly of the birth by parthenogenesis, is what she learns one day when she takes Baby to a city park. Even though she is only a few days old, Baby starts to sing. Her singing is enchanting and uplifting and an audience is attracted to listen. Baby continues to sing on a daily basis and it isn’t long before crowds show up for every performance. This is where trouble starts.
Irwin Shockley is a jaded music composer and professor at Cornell University who lives with his family in the hills on the outskirts of Ithaca. He scoffs when he first hears about Baby, but after listening to her sing, he decides her talent needs to be shared with the world. Through tactics of questionable legality, he takes Baby on a tour around America, trying to get the attention of scholars in prestigious schools like Eastman and Julliard. This he does and then gets approached by the devilish Danish businessman Jacobsen. They strike a deal to take Baby on an American tour. The deal is not in the favor of either Baby or Shockley, but the naive composer knows nothing about business and reluctantly goes along with Jacobsen. This also involves more tricky legal maneuverings to have Doris declared too mentally unfit to care for Baby and custody is given over to Shockley.
As the infant Baby sings for audiences all over America, a religious cult forms in which the followers believe the child to be a new messiah. This also arouses a violent mob of angry Christians who want to destroy Baby for being a false prophet.
At this point, all the major themes have been introduced. Doris fights to maintain custody of her daughter and when she loses it, she devotes the rest of her life to getting Baby back. Shockley is an artist who is motivated by the desire to bring beautiful music into the world above anything else. But this catches him in a trap between the moral purity of Doris and the greedy commercialism of Jacobsen. His ambition hurts Doris by robbing her of the only thing she loves and alienates him from his family. He can do nothing but follow Jacobsen to achieve his ambitions. But Shockley isn’t all bad. He thinks the money he makes with Baby should mostly be given to Doris and even proposes that the old spinster live comfortably with his family. He also tries to hold his family together even though he is blind to how he is hurting them. Shockley attempts to navigate a path between right and wrong, but he only does so at the expense of his own awareness. His myopia isn’t a moral flaw, but rather a personal lack of understanding. And he truly does admire Baby more for her ability to sing than the money she brings in. His belief in the power of art and music is what matters most.
More trouble comes when Baby is performing in New York City. Shockley and the whole entourage get stuck there when a snowstorm hits, making it impossible to leave. He takes a woman up to his hotel room for an affair, but he realizes afterwards that she has disappeared and taken Baby with her. We later find Baby in an abandoned apartment building in the Bronx. The kidnapper, named Fay, and her boyfriend Sloane are holding Baby hostage and demanding an outrageous amount of ransom money. While the police try to hunt the kidnappers down, the matronly Fay cares for her and Shockley brainstorms ways to raise the money. Jacobsen suggests broadcasting a Jerry Lewis style telethon on Christmas day. But on Christmas Eve, Fay brings Baby to an emergency room because Baby has gotten sick. Fay’s conscience leads her to save Baby’s life and turn herself in for the sake of redemption. Meanwhile the telethon goes on even though the public is unaware that Baby has been found and rescued. Jacobsen disappears with all the money and proves himself to be an evil character in the story along with Sloane.
But then again, is Jaobsen purely evil? He went out of his way to produce the telethon that would have raised enough money to retrieve Baby. And what about Fay being evil? After kidnapping Baby, her caring instincts came out when she tried to keep Baby healthy and safe from Sloane’s violence. Her crime forced her to confront the better side of herself and she finally did find redemption in prison. And is Shockley evil? Despite being egotistical, selfish, and callous towards everybody in his life, his intentions to bring music into the world are pure and even at his worst moments, he never stops caring for Baby and wanting to make life better for Doris. While it is cliché to say that everybody is a combination of good and evil, the author extends this idea just a bit by showing how it is possible that some evil may be necessary to arrive at a good end.
So finally, who is Baby supposed to be? At the most basic level, she is a doppelganger for her mother Doris. Baby represents the purity of Doris’s soul. She is the beauty and inspiration that Doris wishes to bring into the world but can’t; because people judge her according to her physical deformity, they won’t accept who she really is as a person. Therefore she externalizes Baby to fulfill her desire. This point is driven hard in the conclusion because Doris dies when Baby loses her ability to sing.
Beyond that, Baby is an innocent toddler thrown into a world of corruption and tossed around the narrative like a football. She has to maintain her innocence by first being dragged into the tacky world of show business and then surviving the ordeal of vulnerability in the hands of the kidnappers. Finally she loses her ability to sing when she gets old enough to begin talking. If that isn’t a statement about the corrupting power of language, I don’t know what is. Aside from some basic symbolism though, Baby appears to mostly be a MacGuffin. The novel is all about the characters surrounding Baby more than it is about Baby herself.
The story does present us with some moral questions, but they aren’t questions that will shake up the way you think about motivations, desires, or pragmatics. This is not a commanding investigation of ethics. It is more plot and action driven than anything and actually succeeds on a technical level more than a thematic one. The characters are well-drawn even if they are a bit ordinary. The author also weaves together a lot of plot and sub-plot elements effectively. Suspense is built up well although the outcome of every conflict introduced to the novel is predictable. It is a tightly wound novel that doesn’t leave any loose ends in its resolution. It is far fetched though and stretches your ability to willingly suspend your disbelief. Maybe you can’t buy the premise of the virgin birth and the singing infant, but it is fiction after all. But the legal proceedings and courtroom drama were outside the limits of plausibility, especially when it comes to how easily Shockley pried Baby from the arms of Doris.
Robert Lieberman most likely wrote Baby for the best-sellers audience. It’s actually better than most best sellers, but it’s also not good enough to be a great work of art. But Baby is fun to read. It could possibly serve as an accessible introduction to existentialism and its relation to moral relativism, but if you’ve studied the classic existentialist authors, the morality of this book won’t be anything mind blowing. As for existentialism in general, the author leaves the question of what or who Baby is unanswered. Is Baby a messiah sent by some god or a false prophet? Is Doris telling the truth about the virgin birth or is something else going on? Is Baby’s singing a deception? Or is she nothing more than a literary device? By leaving these questions unanswered and unanswerable, Lieberman forces the reader into existentialism since the only way an answer is possible is through the reader making their own choice. Whatever you may choose, it is impossible to verify the truth or falsity of the choice. The answer can not absolute. That’s because we live in a world of uncertainty and that means we can only guess at what is right or wrong when it comes to questioning meaning. Making moral decisions based on uncertain truths means you can only do what you and hope it is for the best.
