NICE BIG AMERICAN BABY
By Judy Budnitz
Knopf. 285 pp. $23
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. •
Lydia Millet's most recent novel is "Everyone's Pretty"; her next, "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," will be published in July.
