Babble is a humorous novel-in-stories of a baby’s life. The stories are told from the baby’s point of view, transcribed by his father, yielding at least a slightly unreliable narrator. The baby leaves home, wears disguises, and searches for those who might change his diapers. It is a unique coming-of-age story about (1) loss of innocence, (2) rites of passage, (3) family life, (4) babies, (5) baby-sitters, (6) war and peace, (7) robots, (8) raw youth, (9) crime and punishment, (10) stories, (11) sex and death, (12) language, (13) advanced education, (14) love, (15) the invention of culture, (16) mystery, (17) play, (18) fathers and sons, (19) superheroes, (20) the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood.
'Baumbach has a real gift for alchemizing fictional 'autobiography' into the pure gold of comic terror.' —Newsweek'Humane, imaginative deftly composed.' —Boston Globe
Touching and wildly funny. Should be read by everyone.' —Baltimore Sun
'A brilliant conceit, endlessly inventive, a book of immense tenderness.' —Maureen Howard
Jonathan Baumbach is the author of numerous books of fiction, including Chez Charlotte & Emily, Separate Hours, The Life And Times Of Major Fiction, D-Tours, and B. Also a widely published and anthologized short story writer, he has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stores and Best American Short Stories. He has written about movies for Partisan Review and is a former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics.
