Happy Baby’s spare, sharp prose reminds me of Hemingway, and its frankness about sadomasochistic impulses recalls Denis Johnson.

This is, certainly, immediately recognizable as criticism. Just as immediately recognizable is its provenance in a passionate excitement. “Happy Baby’s spare, sharp prose reminds me of Hemingway” is a marvel of taciturnity, masking tremendous emotion. After all, is it not the dream of almost every novelist to be compared to a recognized master of the form? And to deserve this praise so certainly and so incontrovertibly that not one whit of argument is necessary, that one’s critics compare one to Hemingway and leave it at that?

The book opens as the narrator visits his first girlfriend, Maria, the love of his life. He arrives at her door sporting blistered cigarette burns from a new, dominating lover on each of his hands. When Maria asks about the burns, Theo, the narrator, lies. But Maria knows exactly what they are. She tells him she’s got a series of her own, like a row of buttons, under her clothes. She was burned, she says, by the domineering, possessive lover for whom she quit Theo some years before.

Again, we recognize this, immediately, as the tiresome summary demanded of critics by their editors. This shows remarkable scrupulosity on Ms. Newton’s part, as she self-publishes.

This is the first hint at what we later come to know: the relationship between Theo and Maria failed because both needed to be abused rather than embraced to feel whole.

But we do not have long to wait before this formality is dispensed with. By the beginning of the next paragraph, Ms. Newton has already concluded reporting on the book, and begun analyzing it, as in the quote above. She goes on:
 

Happy Baby’s told from the first-person, present-tense perspective, so that we see things at the moment Theo sees them, know his thoughts as they occur to him. It’s a trendy approach, but difficult to pull off. In the hands of lesser writers than Elliott, the immediacy of the action often, paradoxically, subverts the emotional thread of the narrative. Many first-person, present-tense stories start to feel like screenplays, or worse, like adventure games: “I walk down the hallway. I see a monster. I turn to the right.”

Continuing here, she returns to solid ground for a moment. By reminding us that many “first-person, present-tense stories start to feel like screenplays, or worse, like adventure games,” she deftly forestalls any accusations of excessive abstraction — what object deflates our elevated sentiments so quickly as a screenplay, or an adventure game?

But the reverse-chronological structure of Elliott’s book uses the point of view and tense combination to great effect. As Theo is catapulted backward in time to confront, or fail to confront, the childhood abuse he suffers at home and as a ward of the state, the reader sees how violence becomes entangled in Theo’s mind with safety and love.

But she does not overindulge. She is soon back in the ethereal realm proper to a critic, stripping bare the inner workings of the novel, rather cruelly and indelicately. Such are the sacrifices of tact we make when we wish not to waste words.

Full disclosure: since I formulated that opinion, Steve and I have met in person and struck up a friendly correspondence. Consequently, I’ve become less and less objective about his writing.



But I can tell you that on first and second meeting he’s not nearly as imposing as Lydia Lunch’s photo would suggest. On the contrary, he’s kind and soft-spoken and completely unpretentious.

But what is this? This certainly gives a jar. Ms. Newton is confessing a newly acquired social entanglement? With the author? As we can see, she leaps from the hesitant “Elliott” to the warm and confident “Steve” in some five lines. Five lines! Shouldn’t this precipitate haste give us some pause?

Ah, wait — she’s merely offering “full disclosure.” But of what? She had already written  her substantive criticism before becoming friendly with “Steve.” So what is it that she is disclosing? That she has become “less and less objective” about his writing? But surely this has only potential application—that is to say, surely it must be read as a quiet recusal from any further critical obligations regarding Mr. Elliott’s work. We ought to applaud (and I mean this seriously) Ms. Newton for her honesty, for all its flavor of naïveté. Few critics working today would have the temerity, or the freedom (keep in mind that Ms. Newton self-publishes; the only editor she answers to is her own conscience) to admit so forthrightly such a hobble on the critical faculty.

Before we overwhelm Ms. Newton with praise, however, it seems to me that she ought to at least answer a few of our questions. How is it, specifically, that Happy Baby reminds you of Hemingway? How do you propose to bring Hemingway and Denis Johnson into a relation other than the merely topographical? What are at least a few of these “many” first-person stories that remind you of screenplays or, worse, adventure games? “Eleven Sons”, perhaps? “The Good Soldier”? Even Hemingway, Mr. Elliott’s near literary relative, handled this perilous form. How did he manage to do so without disgracing himself? Perhaps through chronological structures that used the point-of-view and tense combination to great effect?

But these questions pale in import beside a question raised by her final paragraphs. How can a critic proactively excuse himself, as Ms. Newton seems to be doing, from his obligation to remain as objective as possible even regarding his oldest and dearest friends, let alone newly acquired ones? Isn’t incumbent upon a critic not to allow his social duties to impede his professional ones?

As I said before, Ms. Newton deserves praise for her honesty. But she will excuse me, I hope, if I am a bit put off by the casual way in which she sets aside her objectivity. She is in a position to befriend a great many authors. I would hope, for her readers’ sake, that she does not allow such a prospect to dramatically reduce the possible scope of her critical efforts.

Sadly, her candor regarding her confusion of her social and professional obligations forces me to another, far less charitable interpretation of the modest effort above. Her deliberately informal tone, one of the most vaunted advantages ascribed to the blog form, seems to have led her to other, less acceptable sorts of informality. To compare an author to Hemingway, or to Denis Johnson, and then to fail utterly to document this kinship, is a serious omission. The obvious and facile retort to such an accusation is that, yes, she is merely making an informal and personal survey. But  bringing such an informal and personal survey into the daylight puts a different complexion on it. To act as if the published and unsubstantiated statement that “Author X reminds me of Author Y” possesses any interest to a reader — as if one’s memory and excited sensibilities by themselves possess some kind of inherent critical value — is to behave with terrible, unconscious presumption. Or, at the very least, a tremendous, earnest innocence. Such statements are more than acceptable in private conversation — what literate person has not made such unsubstantiated comparisons when speaking of beloved authors to his friends? But they are all the less acceptable, for that, when we try to reason through in writing, as clearly and as honestly as possible, our own thoughts and feelings about the books that provoke them.