Synopsis
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs." —The New York Times Book Review
Happy Baby is the story of Theo, once an orphan in the Chicago foster care system and now a grown man living in California. Theo, saturated with memories of abuse and heartache, and filled with the simple wish to understand more about himself, returns to Chicago to reconnect with an old girlfriend from his troubled youth. Told in reverse order, this edgy and powerful novel slowly and subtly turns mysterious, as we attempt to recognize the root of Theo's plight and the source for his quietly wavering humanity.
"A most impressive little novel, heartbreakingly and bewilderingly alive in a way most bigger books can't even imagine."—Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"Happy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism, and drugs.... Theo could appear freakish; but he is so fully drawn, and so honest about himself, that he seems touchingly normal...Heartbreaking."—The New York Times Book Review
"By telling his story backward, Elliott puts us in a...position of wanting to know/dreading the knowledge, and it's a graceful strategy that gives Happy Baby its unique veracity and humane edge. It also allows the narrative to transcend the shocking details of Theo's life, which Elliott reveals in quick verbal jabs that pepper his otherwise tightly wound prose."—The Village Voice
Stephen Elliott is the author of four novels as well as the nonfiction book Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process. A native of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco and lectures at Stanford University.
The New York Times
The novel's backward structure means that rather than building momentum, it offers the sense of a mystery being slowly solved. That the mystery of why Theo, or anyone, turns out as he does is essentially unsolvable makes it no less satisfying, or, in Theo's case, less heartbreaking. — Curtis Sittenfeld