Turning tricks
Review by TERENCE TOH
Lullabies For Little Criminals
Author: Heather O’Neill
Publisher: Quercus, 373 pages
TWELVE is always an awkward and confusing age to be. It is the borderline year between the innocence of childhood and the angst of the teenage years, the portal to puberty, an age of self-discovery and wonder.
Turning 12 is the first step on the way to adulthood and can be a turbulent point for many of us.
Especially so if your life is like that of Baby, a precocious young girl living in the slums of Montreal. Raised by her father Jules, a heroin addict and part-time quilt salesman, she finds herself constantly shifting houses, moving from foster homes to detention centres to homes of relatives, often coming across shady characters.
Despite her obvious intelligence, her background and broken family history conspire to deprive her of most opportunities and so, partly out of necessity and partly out of choice, Baby turns to prostitution, servicing a great deal of eccentric and sleazy customers drawn to her youth and innocence.
Baby soon finds herself leading a double life: going to school and playing with friends in the daytime while doing heroin and serving customers in cheap hotels at night. As can be expected, however, Baby finds both halves of her life clashing.
Lullabies for Little Criminals is a publishing sensation in Canada, nominated for many awards and winning several, including the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction. Because of its many accolades, I was therefore a little let-down to find that the book did not meet my expectations.
Author Heather O’Neill’s character Baby has been compared by critics to Holden Caulfield, protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye, as both are young people coming-of-age in a world that they are lost and jaded by.
Since I have not yet read Salinger’s novel, I cannot make a comparison but O’Neill’s book reminds me more of the characters from the 2003 film Thirteen, starring Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter, due to the similarities in themes. But while the characters in Thirteen destroyed their lives in gripping and dramatic scenes, Lullabies for Little Criminals goes in the opposite direction, drawing us into the protagonists’ exciting life with slowly paced honest confessions and Baby’s whimsical musings.
While this is by no means a bad thing, I am not sure if it is the right tone for the book; there is little suspense or tension, even in the more sordid scenes of drug abuse or prostitution. To use an analogy: O’Neill’s novel felt a lot like the film Jurassic Park acted out by the cast of Barney the Dinosaur.
Her writing, however, is fantastic. She writes with deep honesty and there is a strange poetry to her sentences. One of my favourite parts of the book is when Baby reflects on the social workers assigned to her case: “It is important to hate the people who work in child welfare if you want to protect yourself from their prognosis. You have to think they are idiots. Because when they say you are troubled and a delinquent, you need to be able to laugh in their faces.”
O’Neill stated that when writing her novel, it was her goal not just to describe Montreal but to describe the city the way she saw it at age 12 and at this, she succeeds admirably. Places and objects, as well as memories, are depicted in a dreamlike quality, which is the novel’s main charm.
The downside of this approach, however, is that her characters come across as slightly unrealistic at times. Most of O’Neill’s characters are either completely forgettable or extremely unlikeable, and Baby herself is no exception. While it is clear that she is mostly a victim of her circumstances and just like a baby needs love and affection, some of her thoughts and actions throughout the novel are rather intolerable, making her cross the line from pitiable to detestable.
The relationship between Baby and her father however, is rather well-drawn. Jules is a sympathetic character. Having fathered Baby at a young age, he is clueless when it comes to raising his young child, yet tries to do so to the best of his ability. Both Jules and Baby recognise that their unusual relationship is affecting their lives for the worse. Yet they choose to stick together, as they are parent and child, and this bittersweet relationship is one of the highlights of the novel.
All in all, Lullabies for Little Children is a good read, but not a great one. While it is written beautifully with moments of brilliance, its lack of a gripping story and cast of mostly one-dimensional characters prevent it from being a great read.
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