Lullabies for Little Criminals has set the publishing industry agog. The winner of the 2007 version of Canada Reads was also hosen for Barnes & Noble’s Holiday 2006 Discover Great New Writers campaign, and People magazine’s book club has elected it prime pickings.
Collective zeal of this magnitude always elicits the skeptic in me, but suffice it to say, the hype is true: Heather O’Neill’s debut novel really is a knockout. Staged within the sparkling grit of downtown Montreal, Lullabies is the walloping story of 13-year-old Baby coming of age amid the red-lit cacophony of impoverishment, addiction and desperation, while her ebullient, madcap, mid-20s father, Jules, routinely shoots heroin and moves the pair from one rundown hotel apartment to the next.
Don’t be deceived by the carefree whimsy depicted on the book’s cover: Baby’s tale is a jawbreaker. While Jules battles health issues and attempts rehab, Baby is shuttled in and out of foster care, where value and security are transients and loneliness is a lump in her throat: “If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.”
Jules aces rehab, habit kicked. However, he comes for Baby hefting an unwieldy volatility, the maddest of love. Left to navigate the complex architectures of age 13 on her own, Baby oscillates between the cupcake dreams of childhood and the darker, more insidious elements of maturity that beckon. As she plots her way through streets peppered with pimps, pedophiles, wildly eccentric junkies and achingly misfit children, Baby’s development moves at breakneck speed. The fallout is both chilling and heart-rending.
O’Neill, who penned coming-of-age flick Saint Jude (2000) and poetry collection two eyes are you sleeping (1998), charts this territory with staggering skill. Shouldering equal parts optimism and melancholy, Baby is a richly imaginative, increasingly self-reflexive gem of a character, whose poetic sensibilities and clever wit make Lullabies necessary reading
