Nice Big American Baby [Paperback]

Judy Budnitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2005

'Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can't turn the pages fast enough' Dave Eggers Judy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and perpetually surprising, these are stories that demand to be read again and again. 'A truly talented young writer.' Times

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Budnitz (Flying Leap; If I Told You Once) creates her own hybrid brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection, working an odd jumble of fantastical, historical and contemporary detail into stories that comment obliquely on the current state of human affairs. In "Where We Come From," a pregnant woman desperate to have her baby in America goes to great lengths to cross the border, waiting for years to give birth until her son "fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs." In "The Kindest Cut," the narrator discovers an old journal written by a surgeon during a war: blue and gray uniforms and a doctor's surgical techniques suggest the American Civil War, but the story takes a fantastical twist as the surgeon become obsessed with severed limbs. In the disturbing and seemingly futuristic world of "Sales," door-to-door salesmen are rounded up and kept in an unlocked pen from which they choose not to escape. Funny and sad at once, it's a kind of twisted love story in which a young woman's attempts to help are rejected: "The salesmen don't know that I am trying to help them, they yell at me that I'm ruining business, standing in the way of normal commerce. The customer is always right! they scream." Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspectives, no matter how odd it might be. These bizarre and masterfully crafted stories will thrill readers of literary fiction who hunger for an innovative American voice.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Budnitz's stark, sardonic short stories are structured like grim fairy tales and tilt toward the grotesque and the macabre. Author of A Flying Leap (1998) and If I Told You Once (1999), Budnitz, edgy and inventive, works in broad strokes to capture the trickle-down consequences of dictatorship, war, poverty, and environmental destruction. In "Sales," hapless traveling salesmen are penned like cattle while surfers in gas masks ride the waves of huge dust storms. In "Motherland," women and children live in limbo, forgotten by men at war. In "Saving Face," an artist is asked to refurbish the ubiquitous icon of a dictator. Budnitz is especially devastating in her more intimate tales, including the title story, in which a pregnant woman determined to cross the border to give birth to a "nice big American baby" carries her child far beyond term. At her best, Budnitz achieves the brilliant creepiness and frisson of Shirley Jackson; and in all her stories, her deadpan tone perfectly embodies the dehumanizing situations she so imaginatively and daringly dramatizes. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007122047
• ISBN-13: 978-0007122042
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, creepy, unsettling stories, April 9, 2006

By 

dephal (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Nice Big American Baby (Paperback)

This is one of the best collections of short stories I've read in a while. The settings and themes vary, but each has at least some element of magical realism. Many of them are creepy, not in a blood-and-guts horrorshow kind of way, but more in a strange, unsettling way. Many of them are sad; "Elephant and Boy" especially touched me. But there is also quite a bit of sly humor, as in "Sales," in which traveling salesmen in some future time are captured by a family and kept penned, and still continue their salesmen-like ways. One of my favorite stories in this volume was "Preparedness," an ultimately rather hopeful tale featuring a world leader who seems quite familiar.

Budnitz writes beautifully. Her writing is filled with interesting images, and yet she never forgets her characters and plots. These stories are rich but not dense. I can strongly recommend this book, and I look forward to reading more of Budnitz's work.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 12 Magical Allegories, February 9, 2005

By 

Gene Koo (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Nice Big American Baby (Hardcover)

Judy Budnitz dares make the genre of allegory palatable again by stretching her metaphors to absurd lengths. In "Where we come from," the first in this excellent collection of short stories, a mother's need to provide the best for her son leads her to delay giving birth until he can be born in the right place - and even then she can't let go. Compared to this, the shenanigans of parents trying to get children into "feeder" nursery schools seem downright sane.

The anxiety of motherhood runs through the best of the stories in this collection. In addition to "Where we come from," the teasingly titled "miracle" (first published in The New Yorker) describes a situation in which the normal ambivalence of new parents is magnified by a decidedly unusual child.

For Budnitz, motherhood is the flip side of daughterhood: "Where we come from" starts with the mother as young daughter. "Flush," perhaps the best in the collection, is a straightforward, poignant story of the intertwined fates of mothers and daughters, while "Visitors" examines the gap and alienation (perhaps literally) between them. And "Motherland," which begins as a thought experiment about "an island of mothers," suddenly transforms into an evocative wish to transcend the roles we are assigned as daughters - and sons.

The weakest stories in the collection explore the consequences of motherhood gone wrong - the Big Spoiled American Baby. "Nadia" highlights the ego- /ethno-centrism of the Baby when she's all grown up, but it soon veers too far into caricaturing the unsympathetic narrator. "Elephant and boy" suffers from a similar weakness in exploring a similar theme. On the other hand, "Preparedness," featuring the President as Big Baby, successfully repackages tired hippie sentiments into a gentle fairy tale.

Not fitting neatly into any of the above categories are two meditations on artistic endeavor: "The kindest cut," which has a certain old-world charm, and the melancholy "Saving face," one of my favorites.

Budnitz's vivid imagination makes these stories fun to read, but it's her observations about the human condition - our vanity, our anxiety, and also our morality - that make them worth reading.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like Flying Leap at Night - A More Mature Writer, March 28, 2005

By 

Jeremy S. Burnich (Monroe, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nice Big American Baby (Hardcover)

I really like the way Judy Budnitz writes. I picked up Flying Leap years ago and was hooked. She is one of those authors that when I go to a bookstore I look up to see if anything new is released. I don't know if she is for everyone though. Her stories tend to be highly . . . imaginative. They are almost like fairy tales, allegories that may or may not have a deeper meaning. To be honest, I've never really looked. Her writing is just so rich and full of flavor that I tend to just devour the stories in a sitting and not think about them later. Her writing has matured and "Nice Big American Baby" has a darker feeling than Flying Leap. I would even argue that it is darker than her novella, "If I told you once," which has its dark parts, but really straddles the space between Flying Leap and Baby. My favorite story by far in this collection is "Saving Face" a story about two people living in an imaginary authoritarian regime ruled by a benign Prime Minister. Perhaps it is a sign of her maturation as an author (or perhaps me as a reader) that I do keep this story percolating in my head going over themes of true love, devotion, happenstance, and self that play in this story. It is really very very good. "Visitors" is also a nice diversion wherein she uses an interesting flash-cut narrative routine that never gets boring or staid due to the fact that after each transition you are left wondering what NEW bizarre twist of dialogue or scenery she going to appear. You really can't go wrong with a Budnitz book so if you are looking for something of an interesting read I would highly recommend her.