Nice Big American Baby (Hardcover)

by Judy Budnitz (Author)

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.

From The Washington Post
The stories in Nice Big American Baby are populated by post-apocalyptic families who keep traveling salesmen penned in the backyard, reluctant swimming champions with webbed feet, and a pregnant mother-to-be who stays pregnant for five years, waiting to give birth until she can make it across a heavily guarded border to the promised land. In this world of mostly unnamed countries -- ranging from the totalitarian to the magical to the merely poor -- almost all places are nonspecific, echoes or shadows of cultures we recognize vaguely; and yet each sparkles with a chiseled edge.

A crisp and witty stylist, Budnitz -- author of the short-story collection Flying Leap and the novel If I Told You Once, which was shortlisted for England's Orange Prize -- has a knack for dropping her characters into universes that are just slightly off-kilter. In "Elephant and Boy," in a city where the relationship between elephants and their human keepers is held sacred, a wealthy and misguided philanthropist interferes in the relationship between an elephant and her young male keeper to tragic effect, leaving the boy bereft:

"He sees her clearly now and pities her; she has never known the joy of being one half of a perfect whole. She is an unfinished piece of a person, crippled, blind, fundamentally deficient without even realizing it. All the groping, grasping, flailing -- it is because she has never had an elephant of her own. It would take an elephant the size of a mastodon, he thinks, to satisfy her."

Budnitz's language is powerful at moments like this, where contempt and pathos meet and the odd is passed off with unapologetic confidence. In another graceful and singular story, "Visitors," a man and woman wait for a visit from her parents and receive a long series of telephone calls from her mother on the road, farther and farther out of the way and at increasingly great remove from hearth and home, until the doings in the background become ominous. And in "Flush" a mother mysteriously vanishes from a restroom, after claiming she sees carp swimming in the toilet, and thus tricks first one of her daughters and later the other -- both of them passively complicit -- into taking mammograms that were scheduled for her.

The thematic core of the book is the relations between parents and their children, and particularly mothers and their daughters, whose close, sometimes cloying, sometimes distancing and always deeply felt bond is the subject of at least four of the stories. The flawed connections between mothers and their children are illuminated wisely here, with just enough delicacy to leave a sad imprint on memory.

Beyond the politics and culture of family, the politics and culture of race, poverty and autocracy are also subjects of a number of the stories; in "Nadia" a mail-order bride from Eastern Europe attracts the resentment of her American husband's female friends, and in "Preparedness" a moronic president given to folksy speech becomes obsessed with the building and testing of a vast network of bomb shelters. He orders a series of drills that transforms the citizenry:

"So there was another siren, and this time people at once rose from their desks and tools and left their places of work and began to move about in a calm and orderly fashion. But they were not heading for the tunnels; they were heading for the places they had drifted to before; they were searching for the faces of the people they had met the previous time. Some went hoping for rebuttal, revenge, but most went seeking another embrace, another few hours of groping with utter abandon on a park bench."

Every so often the author resorts to an image or conceit that may feel heavy-handed to some -- the baby born to Caucasian parents who comes out an otherworldly color of jet-black, the island of war-raped women whose daughters worship their absent and idealized fathers -- but such lapses are rare, and even the weaker stories are carried off with a sense of humor that keeps them from being maudlin. This is a collection that offers much in the way of both emotion and imagination, which dares to be magical without bothering about realism. Budnitz manages to be both funny and serious, whimsical and substantive: With a wry rap across the knuckles she draws our attention to small and vital things.

Reviewed by Lydia Millet
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (February 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375412425
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412424
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,024,088 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 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

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Gene Koo (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 7 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 (REAL NAME)

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.