REVIEW : Heroine wants no baby onboard
Posted on Sunday, September 3, 2006
Baby Proof, by Emily Giffin, St. Martin’s, 340 pages, $ 23. 95.
The jacket of Emily Giffin’s new
novel, Baby Proof, is graced with
a pastel palette that could’ve been inspired by a pack of SweeTarts. Lest any young female book browsers be in doubt that what we have here is chick lit, the obligatory hot pink is used on the author’s name. A delicate chain necklace with two tiny baby-shoe charms spans the front of the jacket. You won’t see a lot of men carrying around this book, which came out in June and briefly hit The New York Times best-seller list, as did Giffin’s previous two novels: Something Borrowed and Something Blue. Chick-lit hallmarks continue in the content of the pages. Claudia, a 30-ish woman-girl, is married to the perfect man who smells good, bites his lower lip sexily and, most important, finds her brilliant. She is daughter to a difficult, self-centered drama queen of a mother and a reasonable, low-key father. There are dedicated siblings and great friends with whom our protagonist jets around Manhattan name-dropping venues and brands. (“ We were at Nobu, making small talk over yellowtail sashimi and rock shrimp tempura, when we became distracted by a young boy, no older than six... wearing a little black Kangol hat and a Lacoste polo with the collar turned up. ” )
Chick lit is generally recognized as a phenomenon that began around the time of Bridget Jones’s Diary, published in 1996. There have been numerous spinoff genres in the last 10 years, with mommy lit being among the most pronounced.
Baby Proof is chick, mommy, and DINK (double income, no kids ) lit. Claudia married Ben in her early 30 s and is now nearing 35. They are solidly in love and, what’s more, they share a rare, essential quality: Neither wants children.
All is near perfect until, after two years of marriage, Ben gets a yen for parenthood. The difference in values — he needs to be a father, she still has no desire to be a mother — creates Claudia’s dilemma: Does she have a child for the purpose of keeping her near-perfect husband, even though she doesn’t want to be a mother ?
“Absolutely not !” I’m screaming throughout the book. “For God’s sake, Claudia, don’t cave... for yourself and for your possible kid you don’t really want. Don’t do it !”
Ben’s mother laments, “Who will carry on the family name ?” — a name, Claudia wryly thinks, that belongs to the woman’s ex-husband, who has little or no interest in his grown kids. Another acquaintance asks Claudia, “Who will take care of you when you’re old ?”
“Occasionally I’d point out that nursing homes are filled with people whose children never visit. That children are no guarantee of anything,” Claudia tells us. “You could have a kid who becomes a poor struggling artist. Or a kid who grows into a selfish, ne’er-do-well adult. Or a kid who has special needs that render him unable to care for himself, let alone his elderly parents. Bottom line, Ben and I agreed that worrying about your care is a stupid, selfish reason to procreate anyway.”
To every narcissistic or self-serving impulse presented as a reason to have children, Claudia has a rational, wellthought-out reason not to. Giffin does a good job of showing that it’s ridiculous to try to convince anyone who chooses not to have children that she should, because the only authentic reason to take the risky, expensive, exhausting plunge is the intangible, utterly individual, “I just want to.”
When someone asks Claudia why she doesn’t want to have children, she says, “Why do I need to have reasons ? When someone decides to have a baby, people don’t go around asking what her reasons are.”
As a person who sees the merit in the often-stated opinion, far-fetched as it is, that people should be required to get a license before they reproduce, I, for one, am glad to see someone write that.
While Claudia makes her articulate points to shut down some of the ruder, unthinking assumptions she encounters, she is also portrayed as the urban sophisticate with some rather shallow reasons for not wanting children. “I’m not interested in eating chicken fingers at T. G. I. Fridays. Ever,” she says on an early date with Ben, to his delight. Later, when husband-Ben tapes their friends’ ultrasound picture to the refrigerator, Claudia tells him, “... we are not a ‘tape things to the refrigerator’ kind of family.”
Claudia also has Issues. As she agonizes over what to do about the increasing tension with her husband, we discover that her mother abandoned the family when Claudia was a teenager. Her reluctance might, the reader begins to suspect as the novel goes on, be based on fear.
Amid all the salient points Claudia makes, the damaged aspects of her personality — when portrayed as her reasons for not wanting to mother — are disconcerting. I spent much of the book hoping that Giffin (who thanks her husband and two young sons in the acknowledgments for “giving all this meaning” ) would not dismiss Claudia’s preferences as character flaws. Overall, she didn’t disappoint, even going so far as to wade into the dark view society has of a woman who chooses not to have children, a view that infiltrates the strong relationship Claudia has with Jess, her best friend who is anxious to have children and fears she never will.
“I know you couldn’t possibly understand this,” Jess says to Claudia.
“... And I guess that means that I also have no imagination, no empathy, no feelings,” Claudia says. “I can’t possibly fathom how another woman feels when I don’t want to be a mother myself. After all, what kind of woman doesn’t want to be a mother ?”
When Ben, increasingly insistent that Claudia consider getting pregnant, begins to use the word “childless” instead of “childfree,” the word the couple has always deliberately used, Claudia begins to get really angry. The fundamentally fraudulent, manipulative choice to change the vocabulary of the discussion is among the more venal things that near-perfect Ben does, and it’s to Giffin’s credit that she understands something about how the nuances of language can be used as weapons against people who don’t fall in line.
So Baby Proof has its merits, the chief one being a pervasive respect for individual preferences, but, like most chick-lit offerings, this is not a book that provides a great deal of delight in the writing. There is attitude but no strong voice, sarcasm but no hilarity, acuity but very little art. Baby Proof lacks the life of great language (unlike the delightful Bridget Jones’s Diary ), and yet despite these limitations, it’s an easy book to read, in part because Giffin manages to create some reasons to make us care about Claudia. We want to find out what happens to her, which options she takes and which she eliminates, or worse, which options pass her by because of her indecision. This is something that the typical chick-lit book does that is beyond escapism: It can re-examine the choices traditionally presented as inevitable and leading to utter happiness, the situations that, when undertaken blindly, often lead to misery. If one element characterizes chick lit, it is a young woman struggling with the process of discernment in a post you-can-have-it-all age, attempting to hold her ground against societal expectations to understand for herself the difference between “less” and “free.”
For a candy-coated read, chicks could do worse. Melissa King is a writer who lives in Fayetteville.
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