Book Review & Analysis: Cuba by Irene A. Wright

Cuba

by Irene A. Wright

      There is no shortage of information about Cuba in the 20^th century up to the present, especially regarding the post-Revolution years. If you want on-the-ground impressions of the post-independence, turn of the century era, fewer options exist. One source of information might be Irene A. Wright, a journalist and historian who lived on the island in the 1910s. Her first book, Cuba, is more or less a travelogue around the former Spanish colony. It isn’t a book of great insight though.

Wright starts off the book in Havana, the capital city of Cuba, where she worked several years for an American news agency. She begins by describing some landmarks and tourist sights, providing background historical information about each one. This could have been more interesting, but her writing style is like what you would find in a standard travel guide. By that I mean she doesn’t write as well as a Lonely Planet writer would. For some odd reason, the chapter on tourist attractions ends with a long divergence into the subject of Cuban funerals. The subject might be of interest to social scientists or travelers who are less interested in tourism and more interested in cultural experiences. This is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. But it is certainly misplaced in a chapter on tourist sights. This book overall is poorly organized, especially in its paragraphing.

Wright goes slightly deeper as she writes about Havana. This is mostly a written description of a city map that doesn’t give a sense of what it feels like to be there. She tries a couple times though. One passage is about the evening corso and concerts in a city park. Another part is about carnival when the streets fill with masked revelers. Her description, however, is shallow and patronizing. Rather than participating in the celebration, she stands aloof on the sidelines and watches as if she is too proper to participate. She writes about carnival as though it is a crowd of drunken simpletons having fun by throwing paper streamers at each other. She never takes into consideration what this might mean for the participants.

Her other assessments of Havana’s population aren’t any better. Her opinion of the people are that they are nice and generous, but not very bright. Of course, she doesn’t go into great detail about why this is so. And her assessment of who is Cuban is a bit off too. I don’t know the actual demographic breakdown of Cuba in the 1910s, but I do know the population had a visibly large Afro-Cuban population. But Wrights statistics of Cuban citizens only account for the white population as if the Afro-Cubans are stateless people who just happen to be there for some inexplicable reason.

Throughout the book, Wright barely ever mentions Afro-Cuban people. They are strangely absent in the same way they are absent from American TV shows like Leave It to Beaver where one or two of them might pop into view for a brief moment.

There is one exception though when she gets taken to a Santeria or Nanigo ceremony. If my information is correct, this is the first written account in history of an African diaspora religious ceremony in Cuba. The description is basic though and doesn’t give any real insight. She also conflates Santeria with Abakua which are actually two different practices, but she doesn’t investigate deeply enough to understand that. For her it’s all just some exotic entertainment like something you’d see at Disneyworld. The urban legend that Abakua societies perform human sacrifices also gets mentioned even though that is something that has been disproven long ago. Those were actually rumors spread by colonial Spanish police who wanted to destroy the Abakua societies for being pro-inedepndence. Wright wouldn’t have known that in her time however.

The strongest part of this book is the evaluation of Cuban politics at that time. The 19^th century in was marked by slave rebellions and the Wars of Independence sparked by Jose Marti. In the 1890s, the United States sent troops to Cuba during the Spanish-American War fought in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. After Cuba’s liberation and granting of statehood, the American government stayed in Havana to prop up a national government. After writing the contentious Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, granting America the right to intervene in Cuban politics at will, the American diplomats returned to the North, leaving Cuba to its own affairs. The problem was that the Cuban government attracted politicians who were more concerned with graft and corruption than they were in governing the country. What little infrastructure that got built in Cuba was in the hands of American and European businessmen who had vested interests in making money as opposed to developing the nation. Wright’s assessment of this dilemma is verifiable in other histories of Cuba.

After time spent in Havana, Wright travels by boat around the west coast of the island and onwards to the Isle of Pines. Her descriptions f the beaches and coves along with the interior lands are about what you would expect from tropical Caribbean islands. There are a couple stories about pirates using the Cuban coast for their lairs and folkloric hunts for buried treasure. There is also a brief mention of the coral reef that impeded John F. Kennedy’s disastrous failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s. If only the CIA knew what other people knew, history would have been a lot different. In the lands beyond the coast, Wright comments more about farming than she does the jungle and natural vegetation. This is somewhat interesting, but not enough to carry the whole book.

Wright’s travels along the coast going east and back west along the southern edge are more of the same. She says little about the sugarcane and tobacco plantations that made Cuba so famous. Instead she writes about the citrus farms, emphasizing those that grow grapefruit and lemons. Most of the farmers she writes about are white Americans, Canadians, or Europeans. Cuban farmers are almost completely absent from the narrative and when they do appear, it is mostly to comment on how poor they are. As patronizing to Cubans as that might be, she isn’t without sympathy for them. She uses the poverty of the farmers to make an argument that Cuba needs to open up to international markets in order to thrive economically. That doesn’t necessarily sound bad on the surface, but what she is actually arguing is that the USA should colonize or annex Cuba for the benefit of the American food industry. She explicitly names the United Fruit Company in her sales pitch, one of the most destructive American corporations to ever do business in Latin America. Most of the second half of the book reads like a solicitation to American land buyers and investors. She writes like Cuba is a ripe fruit ready for the picking by wealthier nations. That might not have seemed so bad in her time, but with hindsight it certainly was a dangerous idea. She is right that Cuba got off to a bad start politically and economically, but her solution is nothing but short sighted and naive considering that Cuba was an emerging nation when she was there and what came later.

The last half of the book is dull. The writing is so monotonous that every town, village, city, and jungle all sound about the same. She uses the same language to describe different places and that doesn’t make for good reading.

Irene A. Wright’s Cuba has some high points, but ultimately is a lifeless book. The author fails to capture the heart and soul of the island and its people. It is of historical importance though since Cuba is the first book written in English about this Latin American nation located just ninety miles south of Miami. I suppose that makes her the first woman to write about Cuba too. That could be a source of pride for feminists even though her writing sucks. Beyond this, Wright went on to write the first comprehensive book on the history of Cuba in any language and it was all based on bone fide methods of historical research, or at least whatever those methods were in her time. This book isn’t great but it is of historical importance. At least it deserves some credit for that.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Run River by Joan Didion

Run River

by Joan Didion

      Anybody familiar with popular culture in America knows about the Western genre in film and literature. Westward expansion in the 19^th century is a reality that is baked into the collective American psyche, for better or worse. The Western genre in entertainment and art uses that as a template for the exploration of themes dealing with the American identity including enterprise, personal responsibility, individuality, freedom, and justice. And guns. Somewhere in the space between the historical westward expansion and the storytelling fantasies that originated in journalistic sensationalism, penny dreadful newspapers, and pulp novels, to films as far back as the silent movie era there is a gap that has been overlooked by purveyors of high and low art. That gap is the less romanticized portrayal of what happened after the westward moving pilgrims settled, particularly those that settled in California. One author that did explore that gap is John Steinbeck. Another is Joan Didion and her first novel, Run River, picks up exactly where John Steinbeck left off.

The connection between Didion and Steinbeck isn’t tenuous; Didion makes sure you get it with direct references thrown right in your face. She mentions the novel In Dubious Battle by name and the land owner Everett McClellan speaks with contempt to his wife Lily about the Okie migrant workers camped out on the edge of their farm. It’s a direct reference to The Grapes of Wrath in which we see the downtrodden fruit pickers from an outsider’s point of view. Lily, whose maiden name is Knight, comes from a lineage of settlers in the Sacramento Valley just like her husband McClellan. The reference to Steinbeck’s East of Eden is just a little too obvious as if Didion is begging you to compare her to that legendary American author. Didion, in a further possible reference to East of Eden, even has an Asian caretaker raising her children who are otherwise almost absent from her life. It’s the kind of stunt a young author pulls in their first novel. These ancestral lines of the Knights and McClellans are important because when Lily’s father, an ex-congressman, dies and the married couple’s connection to their families’ past begins to fade, we see how uprooted they actually are in their time and place.

Lily and Everett live empty lives. Lily is a slut. And she’s shallow. There is no point to saying this in a delicate way. It’s just how she is. She’s easy to get into bed. It’s not that she’s excessively horny or indulgent in her sexuality. It’s just that she has nothing better to do with her life. She has enough money to live comfortably and doesn’t have a strong enough mind to occupy herself with the kinds of intellectual pursuits that would build character. She’s just an emoty dress that gets passed around like a jug of ripple wine at a campfire. There is a profound irony here. Lily isn’t shallow because she isn’t a well-drawn character. Didion is a much better writer than that. Lily is shallow because Didion is a good writer. She creates a shallow protagonist through complexity in her prose. The writing is anything but shallow. In fact, you could say the prose is a little too complex for what Didion is trying to achieve. But it does work well enough to get you inside the empty mind of Lily.

Everett himself isn’t much better. He is a dull person, devoid of intellect or emotion. As a father, he manages the family the way a foreman might run a factory that makes products like toothbrushes or shoelaces, things that he has no emotional investment in. He is a family provider but one that is so emotionally distant from his wife and children that he is little more than an anchor or a hitching post for them. We do learn through the course of the novel that he does feel things like jealousy, shame, guilt, and anger, but he is so cut off from his own emotions that we don’t realize this until he expresses them with his gun.

The novel starts with a gunshot as heard by Lilly as she sits fretting in her bedroom. We don’t learn who got shot until the end of the story. The man who does get shot near the beginning is Ryder Channing. I’d expect anybody with a name like Ryder Channing to be from California, or at least to be a character in a soap opera set in California. I’m just sayin’. Everett murders Channing after catching him having a romp in the bushes by the river with Lilly. Throughout most of the story, even though Everett is emotionally dead, he doesn’t show any signs of being homicidal. So here the plot is set in place to be about how Everett came to the point of murdering this man. It almost starts with the feeling of a murder mystery albeit one in which the mystery is not who committed the murder but why did so.

Ryder Channing sees himself as a visionary entrepreneur. He schemes up big plans for business ventures that are guaranteed for success. Of course, all he needs to get started is money...other peoples’ money to be exact. His sales pitches are successful and he attracts a lot of investors and women too. But his businesses never succeed in getting off the ground and he maintains his luxurious lifestyle by skimming off the investments. Ryder isn’t exactly a grifter; it’s just that he is immature and not very responsible.

Ryder Channing has designs on Martha McClellan, Everett’s sister. The McClellan siblings have a curious relationship. There are heavy suggestions of an incestuous attachment. If the two haven’t actually slept with each other, there certainly is a desire between them that hangs heavy over the narrative. Martha is insanely jealous of Lily which is complicated by the detail that the two women both live in the McClellan mansion near the bank of the Sacramento River. They manage to get along though, especially because the children have a good relationship with Martha in the absence of Lily’s emotional support. As the story progresses though, Martha’s behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable. When she drowns in the river, we can’t be certain if it is a suicide or not. Martha is in the middle of all this because she had been planning to marry Ryder Channing, but the arrangements were called off partly because Everett didn’t approve of the marriage. Considering that Ryder and Lily were growing closer to having an affair before Martha’s death, it is easy to see how the history between the two men climaxes with Everett shooting Ryder after he discovers him post-coitus with Lily on the river bank.

After the suspicious death of Martha, Everett is driven further into despair because a powerful development corporation is planning to buy the Knight and McClellan properties. The intention is to turn the inherited agricultural land into suburban housing tracts. The businessmen are like turkey vultures circling the shack of a nearly dead man. This element of capitalist predation even further represents separation from the weakening ancestral roots put down by Lily and Everett’s families. Even worse, Ryder and others who live nearby are in on this real estate scheme because the pursuit of money means more to them than quality of life. This all builds up to the ending gunshot Lily hears in the first sentence of the novel.

All the pieces fit together making a clear and coherent picture. Unfortunately, the prose doesn’t do it justice. Didion’s writing is choppy and stilted a lot of the time. It doesn’t flow as it should. Some of the run-on sentences go on so long that it becomes difficult to follow what she is saying. At other times, the prose is difficult to pay attention to. It is the kind of writing that makes more sense after you finish reading it than during the reading process.

Another shortcoming is her use of the river as a metaphor. The river is a source of life for the farming community that lives on its banks. They obviously settled there because they needed water for irrigation. It is also a place of death since so many people die in or near the river during the course of the narrative. Also it represents a line of demarcation that cuts the communities off from the world outside the valley. This is especially important as a line that separates the people migrating from the east from those that stopped migrating and settled on the western bank. But a river is supposed to flow and the stream of ancestry that leads up to the marriage of Lily and Everett comes to a dead halt as their lives and relationship reaches the end. But Didion doesn’t emphasize the metaphor of the river with the strength she could have. Its meaning is obscure and should have been developed further to completion.

Like Finnegans Wake, Run River begins where it ends and ends where it begins, occupying a limbo between fantasies of the Old West and more contemporary fantasies of California as the land where dreams come true. Joan Didion t makes the farm lands in the Sacramento Valley arid and inhospitable. She writes about the people that way too. While the meaning of Run River is legitimate, the story is average and the writing unpolished. It does set the tone for her later and better works though. If those other novels had never been written, this one would have faded into obscurity. It’s not a great book, but if you’re inclined to see where the author of Play It As It Lays started off, it is worth reading once.

 

Book Review: Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen Lopez

      If you’ve studied the history of Cuba, you might have noticed that almost every book written on the subject mentions the Chinese population of that Latin American island. You might have also noticed that these books rarely contain more than a paragraph or two on the subject of Chinese immigration. Now that Cuba has opened up to the world after the late 20^th century fall of communism and the fading influence of Fidel and Raul Castro, a little more interest has been shown in this matter. It is about time that the story of this under-represented ethnic group gets told especially since they have done more than most people realize in building the Cuban nation. The social historian Kathleen Lopez tells this story in Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History.

The story of the ethnic Chinese population in Cuba begins in the mid-19^th century. Cuba was a colonial holding of the Spanish crown that depended heavily on African slave labor to maintain their agricultural industry, primarily centered around sugarcane and secondarily on tobacco and citrus fruit. But slavery was coming to an end as support for abolitionism grew. The European nations banned it outright, followed by the end of the slave trade in the United States, and later in Brazil. Although Cuba did not ban slavery until close to the end of the 19^th century, the availability of slave labor dwindled. The landowning colonialists needed a source of manual laborers to do the most back breaking work they were too weak and lazy to do for themselves. Therefore they looked to China.

Chinese migrant workers were never brought to the Caribbean as slaves. Rather they got hired as coolies, another word for indentured servants. This meant they worked on contracts, got paid for labor, and were not released from those contracts until they paid off their debts or the contracts expired. Many of them were coerced into signing multiple contracts making it impossible for them to leave Cuba. Indentured servitude may sound better than slavery in theory, but practically speaking, living conditions were no different. When word got back to China about how cruelly the migrants were being treated, the government opened an embassy in Havana to to handle labor and immigration disputes.

During Cuba’s Wars of Independence, Chinese migrant workers fought alongside Creole Spanish, Afro-Cuban, and mulatto populations in hopes of a better future. When Cuba was liberated from Spain in the 1890s by the United States, Cuba nominally became an independent nation and the Chinese soldiers were initially recognized as war heroes. But old habits die hard and the dominant white population, with support from the United States, relegated the Chinese Cubans to second class status, or maybe even third class, status. Many Chinese people had difficulty obtaining citizenship.

But the end of indentured servitude did bring some good results. Some of them thrived as businessmen, even becoming rich in some cases. Living conditions for manual laborers was still tough, but more fair since a lot of migrant workers were then managed by Chinese bosses who spoke their language and understood their culture. Just like in the North American continent, small business owners thrived in running laundries, stores, and restaurants. Many of these were located in Havana’s Chinatown, El Barrio Chino which became a popular destination for tourists and strolling Cubans on their evening corsos.

Although Chinese Cubans lived in the margins of society, they did sometimes mix with different classes and races, more with the mulatto and Afro-Cubans than the white people. Sexually, their population was heavily skewed towards men because indentured servants were almost entirely male. Therefore, Chinese men were more prone to marriage with mulattas and Black women, but marriages with white women were not unheard of. Many Chinese men paid for sex with prostitutes and homosexuality was rampant in their community. After Independence, Chinese women migrated more freely to Cuba. Mutual aid societies and social clubs played a large role in stabilizing the Chinese Cuban community too.

At that point in time, the Chinese community was emerging on its own, forging its own identity as a distinct ethnicity within a larger host society. With national independence and opportunities for upward class mobility, communal self-perception changed too. Monetary remissions were sent back to China, immigration standards were loosened, and travel back and forth between Asia and the West Indies resulted in a transnational identity in which Chinese Cubans felt as though they occupied a place bridging two different cultures without fully belonging to either one.

This transnational identity became strained with the rise of communism. The community in Cuba was divided as the Communist Party under Mao Tsetung took over China. The Cuban government, with backing from the United States, cracked down on communism on the island. Chinese Cubans were forced to take sides when the Cuban Revolution happened in 1959. Many of them chose to support the revolution, yet after Fidel Castro took over, a political wrecking ball swept through Chinatown in the name of equality and some businessmen lost everything they had worked for. Some Chinese Cubans fled to Miami or New York as refugees while others stayed behind as the Caribbean nation sunk deeper into poverty and totalitarianism. Actually though, Lopez does not go deeply into the subject of the Castro years and how it affected the nation’s Chinese population.

Now that Cuba has opened up, some Chinese Cubans have sought out contact with ancestors back in Asia. Some have even returned there to build Cuban Chinese communities in villages where their forefathers originated. On a larger scale, China has grown to be one of the biggest economies in the world and they have opened up political ties with Cuba. The two countries are now trading partners and Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles are gradually replacing the antique cars on the roads of Cuba that once made the country so fascinating to outsiders.

Lopez’s account of Cuban Chinese history is thorough and presented with a lot of fine details. Her social analysis of that group is also precise and minutely described. And the book certainly ends on a positive note regarding the benefits of migration and multiculturalism. It is, however, written in a dry, academic style that may be off-putting to some readers. The subject matter is interesting enough to override any objections you might have to its lack of literary style. But still, it isn’t always the most accessible book to read.

The only really bothersome part of the book is the over-emphasis on the idea of Chinese Cubans expressing their ethnic identity. Expressing ethnic identity has become an overrated and over-stated part of sociological studies in recent years as if an ethnic groups’ sole purpose for existence is to announce to the world that they have an identity that separates them from everybody else. That doesn’t mean ethnic identities don’t exist or aren’t important; it just means that most people within those groups aren’t overly preoccupied with announcing it to the world. The Asian people I know are more concerned with video games and football than they are with their identities. They eat Asian food because it’s what they like, not because they want to show everybody in America how Asian they are. I sometimes find the sociologists’ obsession with identities to be a little bit harmful, sometimes even racist, towards the people they claim to speak for. They condemn othering, but overlook the fact that parading people’s ethnic identities around can result in the kind of othering they claim to be against.In-groups function in opposition to out-groups so by creating more in-groups with more exclusive identities, a greater number of out-groups will inevitably be the result. This exacerbates the problem they are trying to solve by constantly drawing people’s attention to it. Kathleen Lopez isn’t that bad though, or that amateurish, and this book is written in good faith with nothing but respect for the population she is writing about. She doesn’t exaggerate the issue to any extreme. But the handful of times she brings up the subject of Chinese Cuban expressions of identity it feels like I’m walking around with a pebble in my shoe.

Chinese Cubans is a great examination of the historical forces that a transnational identity is rooted in and also an exploration of what it means to be transnational. The author shows us what struggles this migrant community had and what they did to survive, and in many cases, thrive because of the adversity. It makes you appreciate the lives of immigrants and the will they have to contribute something of value to their chosen country. It also shows how they can give back so much to their place of origin after migration. It’s not about exoticizing them or othering them by treating them as a curiosity. It’s about bringing them closer so we can see what they have in common with the rest of humanity.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Baby by Robert Lieberman

Baby

by Robert Lieberman

      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.