So we have one book about babies and one book for babies.
Let's begin with Babyville by Jane Green. I will declare upfront that I have read and enjoyed my fair share of shameless chick lit over the years. Some so impossibly dumb that I felt like throwing the book against the wall in frustration afterward (see, the Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella). Some so shamelessly rooting in consumption that I felt dirty afterwards (see, everything after Four Blondes by Candance Bushnell, or anything after The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger). Some that I have no shame in telling people I really liked, and openly, if not proudly, keep on my bookshelf (see, everything by Jennifer Weiner). Never before Babyville have I come across a novel so incredibly and, I suspect, unintentionally frightening.
The structure is your basic gals-about-town Sex and the City knockoff, in this case, three sexy ladies in London. One is obsessed with babies and trying to get pregnant with her boyfriend, without success. One has a baby and is obsessed with being a perfect, organic, earth-mother type. The last is a career-minded single woman who has a one-night stand with a colleague and gets pregnant. And that's where the scary takes off. Our protagonist is determined to have a termination right away. She makes the appointment for the surgery and, seeking counsel, tells a few close people what she's going through. Including her mother, a friend, and the colleague jointly responsible for the pregnancy. And they all turn on her. The colleague and the mother hound her to reconsider. The friend tells her how she regrets her own termination at age 18. Our protagonist cancels the clinic appointment. The colleague brings her pregnancy books. The mother buys baby clothes. They keep pushing and pushing her to put off the appointment. And so she does. Then she loses her rented flat, and the colleague and the mother conspire to have her move in with the colleague. She never gets the chance to make another appointment for a termination. And then it's too late. She finds herself more than three-months pregnant, having been cajoled into keeping the pregnancy and now living with the father, a man she doesn't know, who's pressured her into having the child so that he can prove his fertility (there's a back story about him being afraid of sterility). Oh my god. How terrifying.
I think it's meant to be funny. Or maybe ironic, since of course, she ends up happy with the baby and in a relationship with the colleague. Maybe it's even meant to be heartwarming. But reading it I felt a sense of encroaching doom similar to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Or, more parallel, Rosemary's Baby. If the target audience is pregnant woman who read chick-lit, which I bet it is, the book should also come with a label "inaccurate medical advice inside". Since there's a fairly obvious implication that prior terminations can cause infertility, and that woman who eat peanuts while pregnant "often give birth to children with severe allergies". Fucking hell. I think with a different cover (maybe something akin to Twilight?) this could be marketed as a horror story.
That book is going immediately back to the "take-a-book, leave-a-book" library at my local cafe, from whence it came.
The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck by Beatrix Potter is also structured around a sense of impending catastrophe. I guess as a child I never noticed Mr Fox grooming Jemima to take eat her eggs. Gaining her trust over time, protecting her and defending her against the other barnyard animals. It's so obvious to the reader (except very dozy children like me, I suppose) that she's being duped, that I wonder what sort of emotion Beatrix Potter was trying to elicit. Are we supposed to be laughing at Jemima, who is, remember, about to have her children killed? That seems so cruel. Are we supposed to be scolding Mr Fox? That seems insufficient. And here's the kicker; when someone- a pack of sheepdogs- catches on to Jemima's exploitation and comes to rescue her, all that happens is that instead of Mr Fox eating the eggs, the rescue team eats the eggs. It's such a bloody ending. And with such sharp foreshadowing.
I try not to censor what I read to Squirmy, but The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck is so misogynistic- she's so dim, and the other animals are so cruel to her, and the ending is so mean- that I try to avoid it when I can. It's possible that in Potter's time, the reality of death, especially on a farm, was something children had to be taught about, so this book would not have seemed so massively unfair. I still don't like it.
What say you, world?
So Squirmy's going to be starting day care in January. All the day care centers around here actually call themselves "pre-schools" so that all the parents around here can double-think their way to the idea that pre-school is like, necessary or something. Problems with that?
