Burning Babies [Paperback]

We keep hearing that people don't read. Certainly the average person doesn't read literary fiction. What if it turned out that this was the fault of literary fiction? Because when certain rare writers come along, suddenly LOTS of people want to read.

Kerouac, Bukowski, and in fact Hemingway before them, were writers who spoke clearly, with unpretentious vocabularies and with no interest in mannerism or fog. And they created readerships that vastly transcend the group of five thousand, or however many it is, who still read good books as a hobby. These writers also continue to change lives and perceptions on a mass basis.

Noah Cicero, with this book and with his previous novel "The Human War," is speaking in the language of poor people, the people who "don't read," people in crummy towns sitting in strip clubs and laundromats, people who deliver pizzas for a living, people who aren't cool, don't remotely think of being cool, and don't read books in order to become cool. Potentially almost anybody could read and understand these books. And yet this isn't because his prose is simplified, but because he describes the world as it actually is, without using the language of concealment. We recognize what he's talking about. And we also notice that nobody else writes like this.

He is actually more ambitious than most literary writers, because he seems to want to revolutionize the way people perceive the world. He does this by just telling the truth. This is rare, as it turns out. His brutally funny, direct descriptions of how life is really lived in Youngstown, Ohio constitute a kind of benchmark for the reader, and for other writers. Are literary writers accustomed to telling the truth, or are they more interested in impressing people? Noah Cicero talks about the details and contradictions of American life here, and if not for the fact that it's funny as hell, it would be almost too painful to take. After reading him, other writing seems flowery, indirect, and inadequate to the job of describing how life really works.

I've read interviews with this author in which he says that the downfall of literature is that it's getting pushed out by movies and television. I agree and I think the reason is that it takes too damn long to read a book. This one is different though. Like a movie, it takes about two hours to finish. Similarly, you'll want to make sure you have the full two hours at your disposal, because once you start it, you'll not want to quit until it stops. The undie press site calls it a novel I think, but it really isn't one. It's more a collection of random scenes, ranging from darkly funny to moderately disturbing to outright grotesque. Like a well-made film, though, it somehow manages to be always entertaining. Don't think that it's going to read like a script just because I'm comparing it to film; the comparison is solely based on the amount of time it takes to enjoy. It reads like it was ranted into a mini-tape recorder at 4 in the morning. Because it is written in such a fast voice, a raving panic attack, you feel like you need to read it that fast The sentences are short, and there's usually only one per paragraph so the book looks almost like poetry--poetry that's been gutted and hung out to dry--or maybe it's the guts that were cut out, I don't know. But it kicks ass.

Noah Cicero, <strong>Burning Babies</strong> (A-Head Publishing, 2003)

I first heard about this book back in 2005. It popped up on a blog I am quite fond of called Grumpy Old Bookman; soon after, Tao Lin started championing Cicero's work (in 2006, he called <em>Burning Babies</em> "a beautifully-written novel"). And then...nothing. The book didn't actually show up anywhere until 2008. Cicero, from his own blog, in February 2007: "Once upon a time, there was a book called Burning Babies by Noah Cicero, that was going to come out, but the book did not come out.//He got reviews for this book that did not exist.//People said positive things concerning the non-existent book...." I'm still trying to figure out whether he's just noting the facts or making digs at the bloggers who talked the book up, not that it really matters. <em>Burning Babies</em> does exist. I own a copy of it. And now I have read it.

It's [censored for Amazon consumption] terrible.

Imagine a bastard child of all the worst traits, and none of the best, of Allen Ginsberg and Todd Moore (Carlos Castaneda may have also been involved, in some kind of unholy threesome), a child whose...mother?...drank prodigiously and steadily throughout pregnancy and may have smoked some sort of meth/crack freebase as well, a child as relentlessly, horrifically abused as all those kids who it actually turned out weren't as relentlessly, horrifically abused as we were told they were (JT Leroy, Dave Pelzer, Augusten Burroughs...), a child who lacks any sort of formal education in the English language whatsoever, has never read a novel and thus had no chance to have picked up even the basics of plot, characterization, or theme. That child is Monco, the narrator of this morass of language that may be an attempt at a novel, may be some sort of loosely-linked story cycle (the product description at Amazon points to this interpretation, though loosely), may even be some sort of tremendously incompetent attempt at poetry; the only way I could give the book more than zero stars, though, was to block that possibility out of my head entirely. (Note written after the review was finished: it still didn't work.)

The book is written--perhaps consciously, but whether it was the author's intent to come off this way or not, the effect is the same--in an aggressively anti-literate style. Other reviewers who are not as familiar with the world of vanity publishing as I am may not be as familiar with this style of writing as I am, but rest assured, there is nothing "bold" or "new" or "avant-garde" or (fill in the superlative of your choice) about it. Pick up half a dozen random novels, the more grammatically awkward the titles the better, from self-, vanity-, or POD-publishing houses (Dorrance, XLibris, PublishAmerica, AuthorHouse, CreateSpace...) and I'd almost guarantee you will find at least one written in exactly this style. (Pro tip: choose books written by authors with outlandish pseudonyms.) Well, let me revise this paragraph a tad: the word "style" has implications I don't mean to impart. There is a style to this book in the way there is a style to the scattering of mutilated bodies after a particularly nasty train derailment. There is no artfulness to be found here, any more than there is artfulness in the ravings of the unmedicated schizophrenic haranguing you from the streetcorner. Come to think of it, I'd rather listen to the schizophrenic. I had originally given this half a star because, despite hating myself every time I turned a page, I finished the book rather than abandoning (or burning) it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn't deserve even that. To quote a wiser (and much more succinct) colleague of mine (reviewing a different book), "I kept thinking 'Why am I reading this?', but that put all the responsibility on me. Why is this a book?" (zero)

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  3.3 out of 5 stars